The
funicular railway is a kind of
cable-based railway that gives me great joy because of its peculiar shape and its uselessness for doing anything other than what it does. A funicular carriage is generally
stairstepped or
terraced, so you can't repurpose these cars for other uses. They generally work in a particular way, too, as pairs: one goes up the mountain, one comes down the mountain! Maybe this kind of glee is why they seem to be especially popular in Japan today, where they can be taken to many popular sightseeing areas--but a fair number of funicular railway riders are probably there for the journey, not the destination.
You can go on a pilgrimage to the numinous group of peaks called
Kōyasan (here's a
video of the trip there) via the Kōyasan Cable, which even accepts payment by smart card. You can take the
Mitake Tozan Mountain Railway not too far from Tokyo and do some fine hiking in the Chichibu Tama Kai National Park (
video trip). In the famous sightseeing region of Hakone, you can start your journey on the modern-looking
Hakone Tozan Cable Car, defying the generally old-fashioned vibe (you complete your trip up to Lake Ashi on a ropeway, and once you get to the lake you can hop on
a replica of the HMS Victory or 17th-century French warship Soleil Royal no I am not even kidding). Then there's the Kintetsu Ikoma Cable Line. The
dog car, named Bull, and the
cat car, named Mike, are on the Hōzanji line to the Buddhist temple Hōzanji. (Another Flickr user notes that
some people use these trains as part of their normal commute.) The music-themed
Do-Re-Mi car and the cake-themed
Sweet car go to the amusement park Skyland Ikoma on the Ikoma line. Compared to these four, the
two cars on Hōzanji Line 2 look positively normal. There are probably a
couple dozen funiculars in Japan, so...more where those came from! (They even have
cool looking tickets--more
here.)
In the videos above you can see the "passing track" style, where a single track is used for most of the course but there's a kind of "
mouth" area where the two cars
pass each other on two tracks. Other systems may use parallel tracks. For zillions more strangely hypnotic Japanese funicular railway videos,
see this Youtube search results page. (Yes, those katakana spell "cable car", basically. Although they're two somewhat different things in English, they're the same thing in Japanese. There's a note about this on the Japanese
Wikipedia entry, and another link is provided for San Francisco cable car seekers.)
There's not enough space to address funiculars all over the world, but I'll add a few general notes: The name comes from Latin for "rope." Many of the now-closed ones in the US (where they're often called inclines or incline railroads) and elsewhere were used to get into mines, but they've also been used to move ships. The steepest passenger railway in the world, the
Katoomba Scenic Railway in Blue Mountains, Australia, is a funicular railway, as is supposedly-the-shortest and supposedly-soon-to-return-to-operation,
Angels Flight in Los Angeles, USA. There's also a funicular that may be the oldest railway in the world, the
Reiszug in Austria, which dates to the 1500s and is now run by motor--a lot older than this
1920s one from Japan! They're found in
many other places in the world. There are many in South America (most notably Valparaiso, Chile), some in other parts of Asia (though not Korea for some reason, as far as I can tell), and particularly in Switzerland, Italy, and other hilly and mountainous areas of Europe, where
Michel has blogged his photos for you. Apparently they were
pretty popular in the Soviet Union, too. For details on how they operate, you can read
the nitty-gritty of funicular function at the Sweden-based funiculars.net.
You may even know a song about funiculars! The 1880 song
"Funiculì, Funiculà," is about the opening of the funicular on Mount Vesuvius (no, really!) which had to be shut down in 1944 after repeated eruptions caused problems. And yes, that's where the headline on this post comes from. Here, for no apparent reason, is
a children's chorus, Luciano Pavarotti, and Aqua (yes, THAT Aqua) performing "Funiculì, Funiculà."
posted by netbros at 8:33 PM on August 25, 2009