You may be coming home after a horrible commute from work, so I needn't tell you that Los Angeles is a huge city.It is 469 square miles, the size of one and a half New Yorks.If a roller were brought to Los Angeles, the hills, canyons, and mountains would be flattened by another hundred or so square miles.The slope of the Hollywood sign, the top of the hill at Dodger Stadium, the knee-deep slopes of Griffith Park make first-time visitors marvel at the flatness of its plains. and the extent of its hills and mountains.Look in the mirror, Los Angeles: you're like the waves a surfer's dream of, preserved in bedrock.The gentle hills of Downtown, Pico-Union, and Mid-City;the El Sereno Oscillations, Eagle Rock and Baldwin Hills, Silver Lake and Echo Park, Boyle and Montecito and Lincoln Heights, the cliffs of San Pedro;the Santa Monica Mountains and their foothills;and at Sunland-Tujunga altitude, the peak of Mount Lukens, a disappointing 200 feet below a mile in elevation, all within city limits.Now they are beautiful.They were beautiful, and daunting, when Yankee Angelenos first saw them.How to navigate them?Above?Or around?Horse, cart or walking?They were frustrating sights for real estate agents gazing at those lovely hillsides and canyons with cartoon dollar signs in their eyes.His was the same problem that tycoon Henry Huntington solved by building the Red Car system, his massive Pacific Electric railroad, not so much to provide a public service as to transport buyers to the land he wanted to sell them.But it was a vertical sales job, and the funiculars were a solution to the first/last mile conundrum that persists to this day.This is how Los Angeles came to have, and also plan but never build, "inclined railways" of the kind still seen in Pittsburgh, in Europe, and, once again, in the restored and renovated Angels Flight Railroad, in downtown Los Angeles.Angels Flight opened on New Year's Eve 1901, the brainchild of Colonel James Ward Eddy, an Illinois railroad worker and lawyer who was a friend of Abraham Lincoln.He wouldn't know it now, when the backbone of downtown Los Angeles is home to museums and performance halls.But before the bland "urban redevelopment" of the 1960s and 1970s decapitated the top of Los Angeles' Bunker Hill as sharply as cutting off the top of a soft-boiled egg, there was an entire neighborhood up there. .In fact, in its day it was the richest and most elegant neighborhood in the city.Its lofty isolation inspired Eddy to build the counterweight cable car system that sent two small wooden cars up and down "like a robber baron's extravagant dumbwaiter," wrote Jim Dawson in his book on Angels Flight.He took brides to their weddings in houses that looked like wedding cakes.He transported mourners to funerals, and servants and masters on their daily errands.The wagons were, briefly, creamy white like the wings of angels, and were named Sinai and Olivet, after the mountains of the Holy Land.They were later painted a sunset orange color and edged black.Learn more about the Angels Flight saga right now.In the 1880s, Los Angeles already had a few electric cable cars from the mainland.One system ran from the old plaza near Olvera Street to an orange orchard on West Adams Boulevard.Most of these systems failed, and Huntington picked them up and incorporated them into his Pacific Electric system.But Eddy's cleverly counterbalanced trucks were no match for the dizzying slopes of Los Angeles.Three years after Angels Flight debuted, the less picturesque Court Flight began ferrying courthouse workers, from judges to janitors, up the much steeper hill between the courthouse buildings on Broadway and the neighborhood and parking lots located above.Its builder, owner and operator, Sam Vandegrift, never once, in the 28 years that he ran Court Flight, took a day off to go to a baseball game, a movie or any other diversion, unless he was count those three days to your wedding and honeymoon.After Vandegrift's death, no equally devoted soul could be found to run the matter, and during World War II, his widow officially left Court Flight.A few months later, an inadvertently thrown cigarette set fire to the abandoned tracks, and the Court Flight case was closed.In 1908, a developer named Robert Marsh liked the look of Mount Washington, the overgrown hills and canyons above Highland Park, and to entice buyers to become homebuilders, he installed a funicular system like Angels Flight to ascend and descend about a thousand feet.Virginia and Florence, his funicular cars, would stop "every five feet if customers demand it," Marsh promised, "instead of forcing people to get on and off at crossings."At the base of the incline railway was a cafeteria;at the top, passengers could catch glimpses of Charlie Chaplin in the Mt. Washington Hotel's billiards room.Well, it was great while it lasted, which was a dozen years.In February 1918, a cable snapped and Virginia, or maybe it was Florence, got stuck mid-rise.Marsh promised to fix it, and perhaps he did, but in September 1922, the city summoned Marsh to explain, in the words of The Times, "when he intends to start up his inclined Mount Washington Railroad."The cars had stopped.The engineer cut the current and disappeared.The cable rusted.“It has been an ex-railroad for so long that the bluff dwellers of Mount Washington have begged and pleaded with the board to please order Mr. Marsh to pack up his railroad tracks, his rusty cable, and his rickety railcars, and send them to him. go far, far away."And so it happened.But in the 50s and 60s traces remained.Times writer Doug Smith grew up on Mount Washington, and while exploring "the hill," he and a friend found bits of spikes and rusty cables, the bones of the old funicular.Our most fantastic incline railway was not for commuters, nor for the faint of heart.In a land of promoters and dreamers, Thaddeus Lowe was a towering visionary, a self-taught scientist who came to California more than 20 years after his service as creator and chief of balloonists for the Union Army Balloon Corps.He wanted to offer paying customers the same thrill that high-flying balloons provided.His thrill ride was a seven-mile, three-stage drive from Altadena to the top of Echo Mountain in the San Gabriel Mountains.It opened in 1893, the same year the Chicago World's Fair wowed visitors with the sensational new Ferris wheel.For a staggering $5, passengers took an increasingly daunting trolley ride from Altadena, transferred to a cable car, and then back to a small trolley, taking so many hairpin turns to the top of the mountain that, even now, only looking at the century-old postcards of the area makes me nauseous: the Toonerville streetcars supposedly going through 127 curves in 3½ miles.If visitors' hearts were still beating, they could enjoy their destination: a mountaintop resort with a hotel, tavern, riding arenas, dance hall and sea views.This is the sad story of creators everywhere: Lowe was a better inventor than entrepreneur, and he soon lost control of his dream project.The ruthless Huntington was there to take over, but still, the company managed to be both popular and a financial failure.The sky rail carried its last passenger in 1937, and the fare was a measly two Depression-era dollars.By this time the buildings had either burned down or fallen from the mountain, and in March 1938 disastrous rains that flooded the Los Angeles River many miles downhill also washed out Lowe's great company.During the war, pieces of railway were torn out to be converted into scrap metal.Today, people climb hiking trails that were once trolley tracks, and the mountain they climb is now called Mount Lowe.From its summit it was theoretically possible to see as far as Catalina Island, which had its own short-lived inclined railways.Two were built in 1905: one to a mountaintop amphitheater and one to the beach.But, and this was coming, wasn't it? A fire that burned down the city of Avalon also devastated the pockets of the family that owns the island.They closed the funiculars and ended up selling the island in 1919 to William Wrigley Jr., the gum millionaire and future owner of the Chicago Cubs.On the other side of the Catalina Channel are the beaches of Los Angeles and, elusive as the blue butterfly of El Segundo, in danger of extinction, which is distributed there, the ghost of the funicular of Playa del Rey.The Los Angeles Herald reported in 1905 that it was being built, but other accounts say it came about in 1901, to take people from the beach to a clifftop hotel on "Mount Ballona."Some history books say that their counterweight coaches were called Alphonse and Gaston, after two absurdly courteous Frenchmen, characters from a comic strip.It worked until 1909, and photographic evidence of its existence is scant, to say the least.Like every Los Angeles freeway that didn't make it past a planner's map, for every Los Angeles funicular built, two were dreamed of and never came to fruition:Griffith Park: In June 1903, buoyed by the popularity of his Angels Flight, Colonel Eddy proposed a cable car to Mount Hollywood in Griffith Park, with a 50-cent round trip.In return, the city wanted 10% of the proceeds, something the colonel said was impossible.In 1908, he came back with the same plan, the price of the round trip was now 25 cents, and he was competing with another company for a franchise that never came to fruition;today we could hike up the side of Mount Hollywood, taking selfies all the way.The Verdugo Bent: For those who love coincidence, on the same day in April 1912 that the Titanic sank, The Times reported that a former Colorado legislator living in Glendale was proposing a railroad for the mountains of Glendale and Verdugo, that would go from the Casa Verdugo restaurant to the top of the Verdugo mountains.Like the Titanic, the idea seems to have gone to the bottom.The East Los Angeles Funicular: In March 1907, a company inquired about donating 15 acres behind the crown of Griffin Avenue in East Los Angeles for a new teachers' college.As the land was on two levels, an incline railway was part of the deal.The Monrovia Funicular: In 1921, quite late in the elevated railway game, the construction of a tourist complex was negotiated with a sanatorium "for victims of nervous diseases", and an incline railway to go and return.Once again, it failed.Each of the stories in The Times ended with the idea that the project would be highly appreciated by locals and would generate large amounts of money.What did work for a while were Laurel Canyon's "trackless streetcars," wheeled cars powered by overhead wires.From September 1910 to 1915, two spirited little cars carried passengers a mile and a half from Laurel Canyon Boulevard to Lookout Mountain Avenue, giving them an up-close view of the enchanting acres that could be theirs.In 1915, steam-powered buses took the place of wagons, and the excitement, along with the charm, disappeared.What ended these imaginative experiments?The car in every garage, and paved roads to attract them.None of the Los Angeles funiculars ever inspired a popular song, unlike the counterweight funiculars that began gliding down the side of Mount Vesuvius in 1880. “Funiculi, Funicula” has been covered by every Italian tenor for 140 years. , by Alvin and the Chipmunks and by the Grateful Dead.A few private funiculars survive.One, at the Industry Hills Golf Course, takes golfers and their equipment up to the heights of the last hole.Country singer Kenny Rogers installed an elevated railway on his Malibu estate to carry tired players from the tennis court to a gazebo overlooking the sea.This was way out of line, for which Rogers was fined $2 million.But a few owners later, his leaning rail is still there, a selling point for last year's purchase price of $125 million.As for Angels Flight, its story continues, just barely.After the turn of the century, when Bunker Hill went from posh to seedy, Angels Flight was featured in so many film noirs and TV shows that it should have its own SAG award.In 1969, civic "improvements" closed it, with a promise from the city that it would reopen.He did, 27 years later.Then its only fatal accident, in 2001, shut it down again, for another nine years.In the first month after its reopening, in 2010, it was carrying 3,000 passengers a day on board the Sinai and Olivete.The following year it stopped briefly for repairs, and then once more in 2013 after a carriage derailed, although there were no injuries.Finally, nearly 12 decades after opening, Angels Flight was back in business in 2017, now under its own brand registration.If you want to read this article in Spanish, click herePatt Morrison is a writer and columnist for the Los Angeles Times, where as a member of two reporting teams, she has a share of two Pulitzer Prizes.Her de ella public broadcast programs have earned her six Emmys, her de ella two non-fiction books were bestsellers and Pink's, the Hollywood hot dog stand, named its veggie dog after her.