Angels Flight
Hello! My little family has been out in Los Angeles this past week for Mick to do a summer workshop on Film/TV/Game Scoring through Berklee Summer School. The class was held on the Colburn Campus in downtown Los Angeles- so I booked us into a hotel right next door to the campus, so we wouldn’t have to drive there every day in the horrible Los Angeles traffic.
We checked into our hotel and got up to our room and Hannah looked out the window and pointed and said “ look! -It’s the Funicular from the new Perry Mason show!” -I didn’t know it was a Funicular or what that was, but I liked the little trains in Perry Mason.
So we rode it every day up and down from our hotel landing down to Hill Street and we would walk across the street to the Grand Central Market, or Little Tokyo.
The 2 cars have always been called “Sinai” and “Olivet”
I found this on wikipedia:
Built in 1901 by Colonel J. W. Eddy, lawyer, engineer and friend of President Abraham Lincoln, Angels Flight is said to be the world's shortest incorporated railway. The counterbalanced cars, controlled by cables, travel a 33 percent grade for 315 feet. It is estimated that Angels Flight has carried more passengers per mile than any other railway in the world, over a hundred million in its first fifty years. This incline railway is a public utility operating under a franchise granted by the City of Los Angeles.
Colonel Eddy was quite the Renaissance Man!
Friend of Abe Lincoln, Railroad Man, Built the Angels Flight!
Anyway, the top picture at the header of this blog post shows the Angels Flight at its original location running alongside Third Street connecting Olive and Hill Streets-It is now just a little ways down Hill Street between 3rd & 4th.
I found the website for The Angels Flight and on it’s Home screen there is an awesome movie they embedded from the Prelinger Archive-the narrator keeps saying “Flights of Fancy”-you really need to watch this!
And here is the whole site which includes beautiful pictures and a history of owners etc. :
My Souvenir Ticket!
Here is the beautiful interior!
Angels Flight at current location
I like the word Funicular!
fu·nic·u·lar
adjective
1.
(of a railroad, especially one on a mountainside) operating by cable with ascending and descending cars counterbalanced.
2.
relating to a rope or its tension.
noun
a cable railroad, especially one on a mountainside, in which ascending and descending cars are counterbalanced.
Here is a list of all the Funiculars in the whole wide world!