Current location
Current location
It's what is known as a funicular railway.
The two cars are linked by a common cable and act to counterbalance each other. As one car ascends the other descends
If you look closely, you'll see that the upper and lower sections have three rails while the center section has four. One car always rides the left and center rails on the 3 rail sections, while the other car always occupies the center and right rails. The 4 rail section allows the cars to pass.
The original Angel's Flight closed in 1969 and this incarnation opened in 1996. I visited LA a number of times from 1976 through 1994 so I was never there when either Angel's Flight was in operation, but I've been on one outside of Altoona, PA which takes you up to the Horseshoe Curve, One of the USA's most famous railroad landmarks.
Unlike the Angel's Flight, this one has just two rails on the top and bottom sections and movable rail sections, called points, to switch each car to its proper side on the passing section.
The last I heard of Angels’ Flight, after they got it going again in the 90s, was that there had been a fatal accident, and it was closed. My recollection is that when I was in downtown LA in 2001, it was not running.
Good to know that it is running.
“Perry Mason (Raymond Burr) and Della Street (Barbara Hale) ride Angels Flight in the 1966 episode of Perry Mason entitled “The Case of the Twice-Told Twist” in which Mason’s car was stripped in a parking lot adjacent to the upper end of the funicular.”
Also the only Perry Mason episode (before the later movies) filmed in color, I believe.
There was apparently a second, less famous funicular railway in the Bunker Hill section of downtown LA called Venus Flight or something like that.
Some have noted that Chandler wrote of walking along Court Street where “the funicular railway comes struggling up the yellow clay bank from Hill Street”, and say that Chandler was wrong, Angel’s Flight went up to Olive Street, not Court Street. But I read somewhere that Chandler might actually have been referring to the second one.