Funicular Railways

Innovative Funicular Railways

The city of Dana Point, California, operates the Strands Beach Funicular, which since 2009 has carried people between the beach and the top of the hill overlooking it. Closely resembling an inclined elevator, the Strands Beach Funicular is powered by an electric motor on the car itself and it runs on a [Page 606]cog rail system. The car can carry up to eight passengers and it provides easier access to the beach for the public and disabled people. The Strands Beach Funicular travels about 2 to 3 miles per hour.

A funicular called the Normal Railroad, or Western Trolley, operated on the campus of Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo, Michigan, from 1908 until 1949. In the early 1900s, the main campus of Western Michigan University, then called the Western State Normal School, stood on Prospect Hill—now known as East Campus. Students and teachers had to climb up 150 steps to reach the building in both good and bad weather, so the school administration built a funicular railway along the northeast corner of the hill with two tracks, each with a car hauled by a cable. At its peak the railroad carried 2,280 passengers a day, but eventually rising maintenance costs combined with the popularity of the automobile destroyed the funicular and it closed in 1949.

In 2002, at Western Michigan University, four senior engineering majors decided to build an operational replica of one of the trolleys, a difficult task because a bench that a faculty member had saved was the only artifact left from the original funicular. Although sketches and photographs had survived, there were no blueprints of the original funicular. Overcoming all obstacles, the engineering students unveiled the replica trolley on April 8, 2003, and it occupies a prominent place on Western Michigan University's main campus. Western Michigan students, alumni, and local residents ride the funicular and testify to its authentic restoration.

The Fenelon Place Elevator began in the imagination of banker J. K. Graves, who lived on top of the Mississippi River bluffs in Dubuque, Iowa, and worked at the bottom. Every day he spent hours driving his horse and buggy back and forth to work. As a traveler Graves had seen incline railways in Europe, and he believed that a funicular railroad would ride the Dubuque bluffs well. He petitioned the City of Dubuque for the right to build a railroad and the city granted him the franchise on June 5, 1882. He hired local engineer John Bell to design and build a one-car cable patterned after the cable cars in the Alps.

...