A closer look
Squeezing a railway onto a steep, heavily populated hillside means getting ruthless with your steel rails. Los Angeles' historic Angels Flight funicular preserves a genius 1901 design quirk: a three-rail system where both ascending and descending cars share the exact same middle rail. To avoid a catastrophic head-on collision, the tracks briefly split into four rails exactly at the halfway passing loop. This layout drastically reduced the width needed to carve the track into Bunker Hill, proving that Victorian-era engineers were absolute masters at cutting corners without literally cutting cars in half.
