The shortest railway in the world, carrying folks 298 feet up and down a downtown LA hill in the same cars since 1901

Added to the National Register of Historic Places on October 13, 2000

The cashier who handed us our souvenir tickets to Angels Flight Railway gave us a zinger for the ages: “We put the ‘fun’ in ‘funicular!’” I’m sure she uses that line on every customer, but she’s totally right. Is there any more purely joyful way to experience LA history than to take a minute-long ride on the “world’s shortest railway” for $1 a ride? 

The history of Angels Flight stretches back to 1901, when Civil War colonel JW Eddy financed the construction of a short funicular, half a block north of its current location, in the Bunker Hill neighborhood. At the time, LA was going through a low-level love affair with funiculars; there was the “Great Incline” section of the Mount Lowe Railway in Altadena, open as of 1893 (read post #23 about the electrical station that powered it); Court Flight, also downtown, which opened in 1905 and was destroyed by a fire in 1943; two on Catalina; and proposed funiculars in Mt. Washington, Griffith Park, Monrovia and elsewhere. Angels Flight is the only non-private one still left in LA. 

Bunker Hill underwent huge changes after WWI. Initially a residential community of large Victorians housing the monied class, it got denser as the Pacific Electric Railway and later the freeways came to town. Low-income apartment buildings went up; the rich folk moved out; crime grew; eventually the entire area was razed to accommodate commercial redevelopment. Many of the buildings surrounding the original Angels Flight were demolished in the 1960s; Angels Flight was dismantled in 1969, and spent the next 27 years in storage in Gardena.

Since 1996, the relocated Angels Flight has ferried tourists and locals (but mostly tourists) between California Plaza on Grand Ave. just south of MOCA and the lowlands of Hill St., just south of Grand Central Market. The arch, station house and drinking fountain all date from the first decade of the 1900s. And of course Sinai and Olivet (named after two hills in the bible), the two cars that debuted on the original track in 1901, are the same two in use today. 

Recommended Reading

+Angels Flight @ NRHP website

+Angels Flight official website

+Angels Flight: How it works and what it’s been through in its 100-year history (LA Times)

+Watch Jason Segal ride down Angels Flight in the 2011 film The Muppets

+Read Patt Morrison’s story about funicular history in LA (LA Times)