I'm here at the Monongahela Incline.

One of the most iconic landmarks in Pittsburgh.

This peculiar mode of mass transit is at the top of every tourist to do list, and it's a great, easy way for commuters and sightseers alike to get from downtown to Mount Washington, or vice versa.

And this is one of two inclines in Pittsburgh.

But did you know there used to be two dozen of them?

In this video, we'll talk about the history and what remains of Pittsburgh's lost inclines.

I'm Noles.

I'm here to explore and explain.

The inclines are integral to Pittsburgh's image of itself and how others see it as well.

In fact, if you do a Google image search of Pittsburgh right now, invariably one of the first couple images that will come up is a shot of the skyline with the Duquesne Incline in the foreground.

That's the second of the two inclines still operating in the city, by the way.

It's a little further from the center of action, but frankly, is more picturesque and more historic.

When it opened in May of 1877, it was the fifth incline in the city, and it closed, seemingly for good, on Thanksgiving Day in 1962.

But a corps of local neighborhood volunteers spent plenty of their own time and money dutifully restoring it, and it was open to the public again on July 1st, 1963.

It's still operates the same cars on the same tracks that it did 150 years ago.

And here's something I'm a little embarrassed to admit.

I've never actually been on it.

But before you come on a ride with me, I want to tell you a little bit more about inclines and specifically those built in Pittsburgh.

An inclined railway, to use the full name, is a special type of cable railway built to haul freight and passengers from the bottom of a steep hill to the top of a steep hill, and vice versa.

Regular railroads and streetcars can't operate on slopes that are that steep, so engineers in the early days of the Industrial Revolution had this ingenious idea.

Why don't you just put the train on a ramp and pull it with a rope?

San Francisco's famous cable cars operate on the same fundamental concept.

But what Pittsburgh had and still has is a specific type of inclined railway called a funicular.

Whereas cable cars grip and release the rope throughout their journey, funiculars must stay attached to the rope at all times.

Nobody in Pittsburgh actually calls them funiculars, by the way, but that's technically what they are.

There's a few different flavors of funiculars.

There's a stationary engine where an engine at the top of the line winds the rope up around a wheel to pull the car up, and lets the rope unwind and applies brakes to push it back down.

This requires one car and one track.

There's a gravity balance system which has no engine at all.

You need two cars, one full and one empty, both attached to the same rope.

As the loaded car descends, it pulls the empty car up, and then that one gets loaded and pulls the newly emptied one back to the top.

The pro is that there's no power source needed.

The con is that you can only move stuff downhill.

This was commonly used in coal mines in mountainous areas of the United Kingdom and Appalachia.

There's also the rare water type funicular, where each car is fitted with a water tank, and the descending car is filled until it just barely outweighs the ascending car.

It's much like the gravity system, but cargo can be moved both up and down at the same time.

Pittsburgh never had one of these, but I think they're really neat.

And it runs on water, man.

And finally, there's the counterbalance system used by basically every incline ever built in Pittsburgh, which has an engine house at the top, which pulls the rope around the pulleys and simultaneously pulls one car up and the other down.

This requires two separate tracks and a reliable power source to fuel the engine house.

So you have a machine whose primary object is hauling coal and other freight, whose engines rely on a steady supply of coal to operate, and whose ideal topography is one in which it is too steep for traditional locomotives to operate.

That's right, baby.

We're heading to Pittsburgh.

The area south of the city, extending from the flats of the Monongahela River up to the hills that extend from Mount Washington, proved to be the ideal breeding ground for inclines.

Every organism has its biological niche.

There were and are other inclines throughout the United States.

Cincinnati, which historically and geographically is pretty similar to Pittsburgh, had a handful.

Beaver falls used to have one.

Other cities in the United States which currently have inclines include Los Angeles, Dubuque, Chattanooga, and nearby Johnstown.

But at no point in history has any city had anywhere close to what Pittsburgh used to have.

In 1890, at the height of Incline Mania, Pittsburgh had 16 operating simultaneously and it transported 20 million passengers in 1890 alone.

Current ridership is about a million a year, by the way.

Not bad, but over the course of its history, Pittsburgh has had 24 inclines.

That number, though 24.

Put a pin in it.

We'll come back to that.

But right now I want to start in the inclines natural habitat, the hills south of the river.

The major economic driver in Pittsburgh from its early days as a frontier outpost, even up through deindustrialization in the 1980s, was not steel, not iron, not glass, but coal.

Coal was, of course, an important fuel source in the steelmaking process, but it was also used to heat people's homes and businesses and run all the machines of the era, including the inclines.

So digging coal out of the ground and transporting it down to the rivers to be shipped to the city and beyond could net you a boatload of money.

The hard part was transporting it from the hills down to the rivers and railroads.

So it's no surprise, then, that some of the first inclines in the city were built expressly for that purpose.

The first incline, at least, that we know of to go up in Pittsburgh, or maybe I should say, to go down in Pittsburgh, was the Ormsby Mine Gravity Plane, built in 1844.

The Ormsby mine was located somewhere around here in what is now South Side Park, and eventually extended underground all the way to Carrick, where it met up with the Bozeman Mine.

The inclined plane extended from the mouth of the mine, which again was somewhere down to South 21st Street in the south side, where it continued down the middle of the street as a narrow gauge railway bringing coal to barges waiting on the Monongahela River.

So if you've ever wondered why that street is so wide, there used to be a railroad on it, and that railroad continued to exist and serve other industrial functions long after the mine and the inclined plane were demolished in 1877.

The second inclined to go up was the Kirk Lewis Incline in 1854.

It was constructed by Abraham Kirkpatrick Lewis, who happened to own a lot of coal mines in a western section of Mount Washington, which at the time was called Coal Hill.

One of his mines actually went so deep into the hillside it became a tunnel through it, exiting into the Sawmill Run Valley.

So he decided to construct a series of narrow gauge tramways to bring coal out of his mines through the tunnel, and at the other end he built an incline which brought the coal down to barges waiting on the river.

It operated like this for 16 years before the system was dismantled in 1870.

The thing about this incline is that nobody's exactly sure where it was.

The people at the Duquesne Incline will tell you is that it pretty much is in the same position as theirs.

While a map that we'll talk about later seems to show the Kirk Lewis tunnel west of Shaler Street, as far as I can tell, the incline itself never actually appeared on any maps.

Now, Kirk Lewis wasn't the only one to build a system of newer railways, narrow gauge railways to take coal closer to the river.

In 1825, Jacob Belt Hoover opened up a coal mine on the north slope of Coal Hill, just south of the hairpin turn in Sycamore Street.

By 1861, when James Bailey owned it, it too went deep enough into the mountain that it became a tunnel through it.

James Bailey was a very creative man, and so he named his railroad the Coal Hill Coal Railroad.

The Coal Hill Coal Railroad built the coal incline in 1869, a simple gravity plane down the north slope of Coal Hill to take coal from the mouth of Coal Tunnel down to the newly built railroad tracks at the bottom of the hill.

In 1871, the Coal Hill Coal Railroad was bought out by the newly formed Pittsburgh and Castle Shannon Railroad.

The first common carrier narrow gauge railroad in the United States, which meant they weren't just hauling coal anymore, but other freight and passengers as well.

I think the best way to understand the Castle Shannon system is to take a look at this map made by Joseph Brennan.

Narrow gauge tracks coming from the south brought passengers around a horseshoe bend and into the coal tunnel, which was 1700 feet long, 5.5ft tall and ventilated.

Remember, it was only designed to carry coal cars, but they did raise the ceiling to 12.5ft at some point.

Passengers would get off the train at the depot and get into incline cars, which took them down to Carson Street.

The incline was refashioned to be a stationary engine type and renamed the Pittsburgh and Castle Shannon Plain.

The PNCS went on to bring tons of coal out of the South Hills and tons of people in, and it was one of the first commuter rail lines south of the city.

But you still had to use an incline to get to Pittsburgh.

A real railroad wouldn't pass through Mount Washington until the Wabash Tunnel was built in 1904.

I've got a whole video about that saga which you can check out here.

Soon the coal incline was deemed too unsafe, even by Victorian standards, and the coal tunnel was deemed too smoky even by Pittsburgh standards.

So in August of 1890, the PNCS built the Castle Shannon Incline number one next door.

However, faulty machinery caused it to stop working a few days later, and it was not reopened until March of 1891.

The lower station was the same right here on Carson Street, across from what is now the Station Square parking lot.

You can tell because the railroad needed to build a bridge over something.

The upper station, however, was up on Daly Avenue, about 150ft higher in elevation than the existing loading platform, meaning that it was basically useless until the construction of Castle Shannon Incline number 2 in 1892.

Now, passenger cars coming into town on the railroad would take a siding off the horseshoe curve and with the help of a grip car, get pulled up the 8% grade to Bailey Avenue.

The number two incline ran right up this right of way between Haberman and Laclede Street, and then passed right behind this row of homes.

The tracks continued into the same station on the north side of the avenue, where passengers would transfer to incline cars and then head down to the city.

The tunnel and the next plane were still being used to haul coal until 1912, when they were bought out by the Pittsburgh Coal Company, who subsequently leased them to the Pittsburgh Railways Company, who operated a streetcar network.

Don't you love how creative corporate names were back then?

Anyway, PRC streetcars had begun to use the newly opened Mount Washington Transit Tunnel in 1904, which coincidentally sits in about the exact same alignment as the existing coal tunnel, just a few hundred feet lower.

So the streetcar system had no more use for the number two incline.

It went out of service in 1914, but the number one incline suck around for a little bit longer.

By the 1950s, ridership had decreased to the point where PRC was losing about $50,000 a year on just this Incline alone.

So when the Port Authority took over ownership in 1964, the state finally allowed them to shutter the incline for good.

And today, there's hardly any evidence there was an incline here, let alone two of them.

There are a few piles of bricks and chunks of concrete scattered throughout the old right of way.

That's about it.

There is no evidence at all of that old coal mine on Sycamore Street.

Believe me, I've looked.

Now, back to this map for just a second.

You may have noticed this spur line heading off to the west.

This line brought coal cars to a tunnel beneath Grandview Avenue.

It entered probably about where this giant stone wall is today.

And then it carried them about 1700 feet underneath the avenue, basically ending in line with the Mount Washington Library.

Here they exited the hill and took an incline of their own down to the Clinton Ironworks, which was Pittsburgh's first successful blast furnace for making pig iron.

The works operated from 1859 to 1927, but the Clinton Coal Incline only appears on maps between 1872 and 1910.

In 1870, as the Kirk Lewis closed, a familiar face appeared on the scene.

The Monongahela Incline, which had been proposed as early as 1854, opened as the first passenger only incline in the city and potentially the entire world.

It was built by the Monongahela Inclined Plane Company, set up by James Bailey, owner of that coal mine we mentioned earlier, as well as Thomas Bigham and Isaac Whittier and of course, partially funded by Andrew Mellon.

It quickly became a roaring success and is today the oldest continuously operated funicular in the United States.

Like many of the other inclines, this one was steam driven until the motors were made electric in 1935.

There used to be a powerhouse across the street from the upper station which generated the steam, and an iron truss connected the two buildings, providing space for the pulleys.

The cars were enlarged in 1881, and there was a new lower station built in 1904, but otherwise the main incline looks identical to how it looked in 1870.

The men funding this incline knew it needed to be safer than those that were just built to haul coal, so they brought in engineer John Endres, who had built some inclines in Cincinnati.

He brought with him two young assistants, one named Samuel Diescher, and another one his daughter, Caroline Endres.

She was one of the first female engineers in the country, and she cut her teeth right here in Pittsburgh.

She also helped design the Mount Oliver Incline.

But I'm getting ahead of myself.

Samuel and Caroline struck up a romance and were married.

Samuel went on to design ten inclines in Pittsburgh, helping to lay out some of the trolley routes, and also designed some steel mill machinery.

In 1893, he assisted another Pittsburgh engineer named George Ferris to help build a large pleasure wheel that was debuted at the Chicago World's Fair that year.

Perhaps we've heard of it.

And who should supply the cabling for the Mon incline?

But John Roebling.

The machinery had to adapt to market pressures, of course.

And so the Monongahela freight incline was added just to the east in 1884.

This was extremely beneficial because, as you know, the Monongahela Incline is located at the foot of the Smithfield Street Bridge across from downtown, and this meant that freight from downtown, things like furnishings or clothes bought from department stores or wholesale items could now be shipped cheaply up here to Mount Washington, where they could be sold at cheaper prices, and the neighborhood boomed.

The freight incline, also known as the Team Incline, was open from 7 a.m.

to 7 p.m.

and carried, on average, 250 teams of horses every day.

Only two Pittsburgh inclines closed during the Great Depression, and freight was one of them, with its last ride in 1935.

Its remains can still be seen from the McArdle roadway and down below in Station Square.

The owners considered shuttering the passenger incline at the same time, but elected instead to convert it to electric power.

If you want more of the stats about the inclines, by the way, such as mode of power or gauge of track or steepness of slope, I've compiled all that information into a spreadsheet, which I will be linking in the description down below.

The Saint Clair Incline or the South 22nd Street Incline, opened in the spring of 1888.

It was built by John H. McRoberts, and it was pretty different than most inclines in Pittsburgh for two particular reasons.

First, the tracks were laid directly on the bare earth rather than a steel substructure.

In this, it was similar to the Castle Shannon number two and the Knoxville Inclines.

Secondly, the higher up the hill it got, the steeper the slope got.

In this it shared with the Nunnery Hill and the Mount Oliver Inclines.

Now, I don't know if this was related to the parabolic shape, but this was also the deadliest of all inclines in Pittsburgh, which, to be fair, had a pretty good overall track record, better than you'd expect for machines of that era.

But unfortunately, there were four fatalities on the Saint Clair between 1909 and 1919.

All of them minors, like children, not coal miners.

There were two teenage boys, one teenage girl and a toddler.

The Saint Clair was demolished in the summer of 1934, and materials were sold off to anyone who wanted to buy them.

Because the inclines were operated by private companies, there was no guarantee that there would be acceptable replacements in their absence, and as soon as demolition began, complaints arose from both above and below about the sorry state of the Sterling Street steps.

Basically the only other viable corridor up the hill.

This newspaper said they'd be a disgrace to any hick town, let alone Pittsburgh.

I'll let you interpret that how you wish.

Basically, the only remains of the Saint Clair today are the stone walls along Greeley Street, which once held back the banked earth.

Potentially the densest concentration of inclines ever built was the hollow south of 12th Street, where between 1890 and 1928, you could have seen three operating at one time, all within a few hundred feet of each other.

From east to west you had the Mount Oliver, the Keeling Coal, and the Knoxville.

The Mount Oliver Incline, officially the South 12th Street inclined plane, was put up by John and Caroline Endres in 1872.

It took four minutes to transport passengers and freight up a 1600 foot length, for a top speed of 4.5mph.

Passengers paid a three cent fair, while freight weighing up to 100 pounds cost just $0.05.

Something like a regular market basket was free.

Its upper station was located four doors down that way, across from the old Trolley powerhouse on Warrington Avenue at the intersection of Mount Oliver Street.

Of all the inclines, this one passed over the most amount of streets, and so the remains are pretty easy to spot.

Going downhill from Warrington, we come to Saint Martin Street, where this parking area covers an old stone foundation that supported one of the steel columns that held up the incline.

Then, on Regina Street, we find this extra little bit of road, which was another piece of foundation.

Down on Monastery Street, we can see another bit of Stonewall that's being taken over by grass.

And finally down on Welsh Way.

We find this large brick column that would have served the same purpose as the stone columns above.

The location of the lower station here on South 12th Street and Freyberg Street is pretty easy to spot as well.

Here's a rule of thumb in Pittsburgh, if a building was obviously built in the 70s, it means there used to be something way cooler there, which it replaced.

In its heyday, ridership was between 1200 and 1400, but by 1950 that number had dropped to just 200, and so it was decided to close the Mount Oliver Incline on July 6th, 1951.

For comparison sake, the Monongahela Incline sees an average weekday ridership of 1500.

A number that stayed surprisingly consistent since at least the 1960s, when Pittsburgh Railways Company held a public meeting to discuss the closing of the incline.

Nobody showed up to voice dissent.

Now, up here over the railroad tracks, is where a tipple used to sit at the bottom end of the Keeling Coal Incline, which operated from 1870 to 1928.

Like other coal inclines, it was connected at the top to a mine mouth, in this case separated by a short distance by a narrow gauge railway.

The mine mouth sat at the end of Regina Street.

The Keeling Coal Company had bought out other coal mines, including the Ormsby Mine and the Kirk Lewis mines, and continued to extend the coal railroad, which ran underground for miles, eventually popping up crossing hollows on trestles between Carrick and places like Beechview.

But I'm digressing.

There's really nothing left of the Keeling mine and incline, except for those brick supports down on Welsh Way, and the remains of the incline as it passed underneath Roseville Street in this tunnel, which you'd never know existed unless you spent the last half hour looking for it in the woods like I just did.

As you can see from this amazing old photograph, the incline actually passed underneath Roseville Street in a shallow tunnel just tall enough to let the coal cars underneath.

And when the incline was abandoned, they bricked it up and called it a day.

Oh, and here's the remains of that old house to the right of the incline in the photograph.

Not an incline, but still pretty cool.

But the big man on campus was the Knoxville Incline, put up in 1890, and this thing was a half mile long, making it by far the longest incline in the city's history.

There were special grooves in the floor of the stations and cars, so that horse drawn buggies could roll right in with no unhitch needed.

The streetcar line ran right to it, and the cars, which were absolute behemoths weighing ten tons apiece, could carry streetcars on them.

Most of the incline was built on a substructure like the others, but towards the top, a good amount of it actually ran through this trough so that they could keep a consistent grade of 14%, making it the only sunken incline in Pittsburgh's history.

But what makes this incline even more interesting than that is the 65 degree turn in the middle of the track.

There was unfortunately, one non-fatal accident in 1930, in which a car failed to make the curve.

The upper station was located where Warrington Avenue, Brownsville Avenue, and Roseville Street come together right where the Daily Mart is today.

They even painted a sign on the back of the building to let you know.

It's also pretty easy to tell where it came into the lower station here on Bradish Street because of this big empty lot.

This old stone wall And this apartment building that doesn't fit in at all.

If you were standing in this neighborhood between 1890 and 1928, you would have been able to see going up the hill behind me, three inclines nearly parallel, terminating within a block of each other.

The Knoxville Incline was closed on December 3rd, 1960, and was totally demolished by the new year.

Before we head across the river, there were three more inclines this side of the Mon that we know existed, we just don't know a lot about.

The Cray and Company Coal incline was located in the Sawmill Run Valley on the edge of the west end, right about where this power line cut comes down the hill from Adolph Street.

This is the poster child for infrastructure that was well documented on maps, but as far as I know, never had any photographs taken of it.

And a walk through the woods last year showed me there's no physical evidence left.

The 1862 Hopkins map shows the mine mouth and a connection to the railroad.

The 1872 map shows upper and lower buildings, but that might just be an indication of where the incline section ends.

There is no mine mouth shown, and a siding at the bottom leads to coke ovens.

There's a tunnel marked perhaps Kirk Lewis Tunnel, but it never comes out of the other side of Mount Washington.

Cray and Companys coal railroad wraps around Mount Washington through the West End.

By 1886, the tunnel is shown going through the mountain and the mine mouth is shown again.

By 1890, there is no sign the mine or the incline ever existed at all.

In a similar vein is the Jones and Laughlin Coal Incline, which was owned and operated by J&L Steel and fed coal directly into their south side steel mill.

It appears on maps as early as 1862 and as late as 1890.

It ran from about Stromberg Street in the south side slopes down to the PVNC railroad tracks, and possibly ran right into the mill.

Presumably this was a gravity plane, but even between those years on the maps, its length and even its exact positioning vary quite a bit.

It might not look like much anymore, but behind me are the remains of the last incline to be built in Pittsburgh.

This was the Kund & Eiben incline, built in 1915 by the Kund & Eiben Manufacturing Company, who had their planing mill, where I'm standing now, just north of red, white and blue and extra space storage on route 51.

They used it to transport raw materials in finished products between their planing mill and the Pennsylvania and West Virginia Railroad tracks up at the top of the hill.

The planing mill was demolished in 1929 to make way for Sawmill Run Boulevard.

And the incline was left to be abandoned.

Just across the Mon from the south side was one of the city's shortest inclines.

The Fort Pitt Incline moved commuters and students from Second Avenue at 10th Street up to the Holy Ghost College on the bluff.

Designed by Samuel Diescher, it operated from 1882 to 1900.

The tracks were made of rails set on ties, on ballast, just like a normal railroad, except at a 36% grade.

Each car could carry up to 15 tons.

If you want an idea of what a ride on this incline would have been like, it's easy.

The public steps leading from the mouth of the Armstrong Tunnel to the pedestrian bridge at Duquesne University follow the path exactly, gaining 135 vertical feet in 375 horizontal, which actually only makes it the sixth steepest incline in city history.

Somebody on Wikipedia made this fantastic inclinea chart, which I should have mentioned earlier.

Link in the description down below.

The incline was abandoned in 1900 due to unprofitability, and burned down in 1903.

The ruins were dismantled over the next few years.

Running between Ridgeway Street here in the Hill District, and 17th and Penn Down below in the Strip District, the Penn Incline operated between 1884 and 1953, and this thing was massive.

It was the biggest incline in Pittsburgh, maybe the biggest ever built on Earth in terms of materials used.

But it was in the middle of the pack in terms of length.

It was built to carry 30 ton coal cars, which could each carry 20 tons of coal up to the Hill district, where a lack of good roads made coal more expensive than in other parts of the city.

What makes this one so impressive, at least to me, is that it suspended over mid-air and not built with the topography.

It quickly switched to hauling freight and passengers.

They even opened the Penn Incline Resort, a saloon and entertainment venue at the upper station, but it burned down in 1892.

Bigelow Boulevard was built underneath the incline, and the Pennsylvania Railroad operated one of the world's busiest rail yards for decades beneath its steel substructure.

By the end of World War Two, its ridership had plummeted, and so the Pittsburgh Railways Company, who had bought it in 1904, sought to close it.

The final run, in November of 1953 carried only three passengers.

Out of town, a few miles in Bellevue was the Bellevue and Davis Island Incline, which connected the old Bellevue Railroad station, which was located somewhere over there to the town of Bellevue, which is located up on the bluff behind me.

Passengers disembarking at the railroad station would walk over to an elevator, which you can see the stone remains of that would take them 85ft up to the top of the cliff where they were, then board an electric streetcar that would slowly gain in elevation as it traveled to half mile along the eastern edge of Dilworth Run Ravine before landing them in downtown Bellevue.

The system was plagued by mismanagement and faulty equipment.

In fact, there was a running joke that it wasn't powered by electricity, but rather by the GOP.

Get out and push!

It closed in March of 1889.

It opened under new management in 1891, but nobody seemed to trust them anymore, and so it closed for good in 1893.

The same year, the Pittsburgh streetcar lines reached Bellevue.

Across the river here in McKees Rocks and Stowe Township, The Norwood Incline operated from 1901 to 1923, carrying passengers from here on Island Avenue up to the new housing development called Norwood Place.

It was free for its first two years, but in 1903 a $0.01 fare was added during peak hours, earning it the nickname the Penny incline.

It was pretty unique among local inclines for a couple of reasons.

First, the track gauge was only 42in, which is pretty narrow, and secondly, it was comprised of three rails, the middle rail being shared between the upwards and the downwards moving cars.

The catch was that in the middle of the run, the tracks briefly split, allowing the cars which ran in sync to narrowly avoid missing each other.

There was a hotel built at the bottom right over there, but it's long gone, as is the public staircase that was built into the right of way in 1930.

In fact, the only thing that remains today of the Norwood Incline is this Art Nouveau style shelter behind me, where passengers could await the next car on Island Avenue.

Now let's head back to the city.

These are the remains of the first incline north of the Allegheny River.

It was called the Ridgewood Incline, and it operated from the intersection of Charles and New Block Streets.

Here, at the bottom of the hill to the intersection of Yale and Ridgewood Streets at the top of the hill.

It opened in December of 1886 and burned down just six months later, in May of 1887.

It was never rebuilt.

Meanwhile, these are the remains of the upper station of the Ridgewood Incline.

Now, as far as I'm aware, there were never any photographs taken of this incline, so I can't be 100% sure of what I'm looking at.

But that thing over there on the corner sure looks like a lattice gate to me, meant to keep people off of cars once they were already in transit, so that's pretty cool.

Just up the street here at the intersection of Strauss in the now abandoned Metcalfe Street, was the Clifton Incline.

It was built in 1889 by the developer of the Clifton Park neighborhood on the hill up behind us in order to boost home sales.

It had two cars, one for passengers and a dummy cart, weighted with stones for counterbalancing.

The incline was very popular and home sales were boosted until November 10th, 1905.

On that day, a cable snapped, sending the dummy car down through the waiting room, severely injuring a man waiting to get on and sending it across the street into the front porch of number 14, Strauss Street.

Miraculously, nobody was killed, but every window in the neighborhood was shattered.

The incline never ran again.

The Troy Hill Incline or the Mount Troy Incline, depending on how dramatic you're feeling that day, operated for a decade and never profitably.

Designed in 1887 by Samuel Diescher, it opened to the public September 20th, 1888, taking freight and passengers up to 47% grade between Old Ohio Street and 30th Street Bridge at the bottom of the hill, up here to Lowry and lay at the top of the hill.

Now, you might have heard that this building used to be the upper station for the incline, but it was actually built several years after the incline closed for repairs in 1898.

It is believed there was just a small tollbooth on either end of the incline, and not these huge stations that other inclines could boast.

All this and more can be gleaned from reading this historical plaque, which is taller than I am.

And finally, this is the Nunnery Hill Incline, built to connect Fineview up there with Allegheny City down here.

It was only in operation for seven years, closing without warning in September of 1895.

It was the first curved track incline in the world, predating even the Knoxville Incline that we discussed earlier.

And what makes this one really unique among Northside inclines is that the old station building survives.

It's now this apartment building on the corner of Henderson and Federal.

There was supposed to be an incline built somewhere on Buena Vista Street and another somewhere in Spring Garden, but they never were, leaving the number of Pittsburgh inclines at an even 24.

But that number 24.

Pull that pin back out.

Brookline Connections is a fantastic local history website that I often use to begin my research into these videos.

They say that historically there's been considered 23 inclines in Pittsburgh, but they discovered a 24th that was the Kund and Eiben Incline in Sawmill Run Valley.

And even though I showed you all 24 of those today, I have trouble accepting that 24 is the actual number.

Consider that the Bellevue and Davis Island Incline wasn't an incline at all.

They just called themselves one.

Castle Shannon Number two wasn't a funicular.

It was more like a San Francisco cable car.

The Norwood Incline wasn't in Pittsburgh.

Actually, most of these were not technically.

The four And old Allegheny City were gone before the 1907 annexation, and most of the early ones in the vicinity of Mount Washington were built prior to the 1872 annexation, meaning that even our beloved Mon incline wasn't technically built in Pittsburgh, but I'm a reasonable man.

If it became part of Pittsburgh while there was an incline there, then it's a Pittsburgh incline.

And you know what?

Allegheny City and Bellevue and McKees Rocks are all basically part of Pittsburgh, too, so I'll let those slide.

But now I have another problem.

If we are including those near the city, then why are the Becks Run Coal Incline and the Streets Run Coal Incline not on this list?

I mean, look at these lithographs from 1877.

Those are clearly gravity planes coming out of mine mouths.

This map from 1909 shows one even more starkly.

Becks run is nowadays just outside city limits, while Hayes is fully within it.

This 1886 map shows what could very well be a gravity plane between Brookline and Overbrook, and this 1862 map shows maybe eight operating in what's now Baldwin and Hayes, as well as another incline labeled the Keeling, between the Ormsby Plain and the Jail Incline.

There was also the Pittsburgh Knoxville and Saint Clair Street Railway, an electrified system which took cars from 13th Street over the tracks and up the hill to Knoxville.

It had a 15% grade, but since the cars had their own mode of power, it can't be called an incline.

Then again, neither can the one in Bellevue.

So how many inclines did Pittsburgh used to have?

Well, it depends on what you want to count.

I think the more important question is, should we have gotten rid of all of them except two?

Pittsburgh is a hard city to navigate.

Ever since I learned there was a Troy Hill incline, I can't drive up Rialto Street without wishing it were still there.

I think the north side and the south side would be better connected if those inclines still existed.

I think it would be better for drunk Duquesne students to use an incline to get to Carson Street instead of that rickety old staircase.

1 in 5 city residents don't own a car, and the bus system is chronically late, so anything we can add in terms of transit only helps.

It shouldn't take people who can see the strip district from their backyard a half hour to get there.

But at the same time, I know things have changed.

When the Fort Pitt Incline was in operation, the Armstrong Tunnels weren't there, and the South 10th Street Bridge was a covered bridge.

If those 20 million passengers in 1890 had had the Liberty Tubes, I think they would have used them.

And even if you wanted to rebuild one today, you'd have to clear all kinds of trees, spend years stuck in environmental review, and spend so much money on something that might not even prove that popular, because so many neighborhoods have halved in population since the inclines were there.

I don't have the answers for you, but I do think we should rebuild the Penn Incline.

I mean, look at that thing.

It's awesome.

When Bailey, Bigham and Whittier were deciding where exactly to build their incline in 1870, their surveyors gave them two options.

One ended up being the site they chose at the foot of the Smithfield Street Bridge, and the other was further down across from The Point, a site that seven years later was utilized by the Duquesne Incline.

Evidently, these men had some great perception of the future, for while every other incline has closed, these two remain.

Well, friends, thank you for letting me talk your ear off for the last.

Oh, boy, about Pittsburgh's super unique transportation history.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I think my ride is here.

Leave a comment down below.

Tell me anything you want to tell me.

I do read every single one.

Thank you for watching and I'll see you next time.