Angels Flight

Angels Flight, Los Angeles
The Angels Flight route at its original location, 1903
Route length:	0.091 km
Gauge :	762 mm ( narrow gauge )

The facility rebuilt in 1996, here at the time of decommissioning in the 2000s without a car

Angels Flight carriage

Angels Flight is the name of a historic funicular with a gauge of 762 mm on Bunker Hill in downtown Los Angeles . When it opened in 1901, the railway was considered to be the shortest railway line in the world with a length of almost 100 meters. The Zagreb funicular has been in operation since 1893 and is only 66 meters long. Angels Flight has been the location of numerous Hollywood film productions .

history

Track diagram of the Angels Flight, the green track is shared

The line began operating in 1901 as the Los Angeles Incline Railway . It connected Hill Street / Third Street and Olive Street over a distance of almost 100 meters and overcame an incline of 33%. Two wagons, named after the biblical mountains Olivet and Sinai , run on a common rope and ran in opposite directions on a route provided with three rails. The middle bar was shared by both directions of travel and the car passed each other at a medial siding .

In 1962 the train was named a Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Monument . This made it one of the first objects (No. 4) to be honored by the city's newly founded cultural heritage board . As the run-down residential area on Bunker Hill was fundamentally redesigned at the end of the 1960s , the railway stopped operating in 1969. The track was dismantled and its individual parts were stored.

In 1996 the facility was rebuilt elsewhere. Since then, what is now 91 meters long has connected Hill Street with California Plaza . After the rope broke in February 2001 and one passenger was killed and others injured in the subsequent collision between the two cars, the railway was closed until it reopened in 2010.

After a fundamental overhaul of the safety and braking systems and the subsequent reopening, the railway was taken out of service again on September 5, 2013 after one of the two cars in the middle section had derailed. In addition to the impermissible inactivation of safety systems, the cause was also the high level of wear on the wheel flanges . Since the wagons did not have bogies, the wheel flanges on the arches in the area of ​​the passing point rubbed the rail heads very hard, so that the wheels eventually climbed up and one wagon derailed.

reception

art

Angel's Flight is the name of a 1931 oil painting by Millard Sheets . It depicts two young women looking down at the city from the platform of a funicular car and is on display at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art .

literature

In 1927 Don Ryan wrote the novel Angels Flight , which first dealt with the train. The railway is also mentioned in the novels The King in Yellow (1938) and The High Window (1942) by Raymond Chandler and in The Red Guard by Nick Carter (1967).

Angels Flight is the original title and location of the crime novel Black Angels by Michael Connelly from his Harry Bosch crime series.

Movie

Angels Flight was the location and location of many film productions:

• Good Night, Nurse (1916) with Neal Burns and Stella Adams
• Up She Goes (1918) with Billie Rhodes
• All Jazzed Up (1920) with Bobby Vernon and Helen Darling
• The Impatient Maiden (1932) by James Whale with Mae Clarke and Una Merkel
• Adultery ( The Unfaithful , 1947) with Marta Mitrovich and Ann Sheridan
• Daring Alibi ( Criss Cross , 1948) with Dan Duryea , Burt Lancaster and Yvonne De Carlo
• The Man with the Scar ( Hollow Triumph , 1948) with Paul Henreid
• Night Has a Thousand Eyes ( Night Has A Thousand Eyes , 1948) with G. Edward Robinson
• Act of violence ( Act of Violence , 1949) with Van Heflin
• Once a Thief (1950) with June Havoc and Cesar Romero
• Using Life ( Southside 1: 1000 , 1950) with George Tobias and Don DeFore
• M (1951) with David Wayne
• The Turning Point (1952) with William Holden and Alexis Smith
• The Glenn Miller Story ( The Glenn Miller Story , 1953) with James Stewart and Harry Morgan
• Cry of the Hunted ( Cry of the Hunted , 1953) with Vittorio Gassman and William Conrad
• Kiss Me Deadly (1955) with Ralph Meeker
• The Indestructible Man (1956) with Lon Chaney Jr. and Marian Carr
• Little Shop of Horrors ( The Little Shop of Horrors , 1960) by Roger Corman with Jonathan Haze
• The Exiles (1961) by Kent Mackenzie
• The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed Up Zombies! (1964) by Ray Dennis Steckler with Cash Flag
• Perry Mason (TV Series, Episode: The Case of the Twice-Told Twist , 1966)
• Gold Trap ( The Money Trap , 1966) with Glenn Ford
• The Outsider (TV series, an episode, 1967)
• City of Angels ( City of Angels , 1998) with Nicolas Cage and Meg Ryan
• Los Angeles Plays Itself (2005), documentary by Thom Andersen
• The Muppets ( The Muppets , 2011)
• La La Land (2016) with Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling
• Bosch / 4th season (2018), with Titus Welliver

music

• The city of Los Angeles commissioned the conductor David Woodard to compose and perform a memorial song entitled "An Elegy for Two Angels" in honor of Leon Praport, who was killed by the funicular.

See also

• List of funiculars
• List of entries on the National Register of Historic Places in Los Angeles

Web links

Commons : Angels Flight  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

• angelsflight.org , Official website of the Angels Flight Railway

Individual evidence

1. ^ Joe Thompson: Los Angeles Area Funiculars . October 1, 2013.
2. ↑ ^{a b} Manfred Braunger, DuMont Travel Guide Travel Guide USA, The Southwest , ISBN 978-3-77017-965-7 , MairDumont , 2015, p. 173
3. ^ ^{A b} Fatal accident on the cable car in Los Angeles , February 3, 2001, Neue Zürcher Zeitung
4. ^ Michel Azéma: Zagreb funicular: Technical . In: Funimag . Retrieved February 18, 2016.
5. ↑ Richard Deiss, Silberling and iron: 1000 nicknames in transport and traffic and what's behind them , ISBN 978-3-83916-269-9 , BoD, 2010, p. 62
6. ↑ Torsten Meyer, Journey through the City of Angels: Stories from Los Angeles , ISBN 9783738620832 , BoD, 2015, p. 60
7. ↑ Historic Spots in California, Third Edition , ISBN 978-0-80474-020-3 , Stanford University Press , p. 166 (in English)
8. ↑ ^{a b c d e} The decades-long effort to save Los Angeles' iconic railway, Angels Flight , CBS News, November 23, 2017.
9. ↑ LACMA website , accessed on January 8, 2016
10. ↑ Schwarze Engel, Heyne-Verlag, Munich, 2000, ISBN 3-453-17858-0 .
11. ↑ Jim Dawson, Angels Flight goes to the movies (in English)
12. ↑ Bert Rebhandl, The city that only exists in films , December 21, 2015, taz.de
13. ↑ Kenneth Reich: Family to Sue City, Firms Over Angels Flight Death . In: Los Angeles Times , March 16, 2001. 
14. ↑ Jim Dawson: Los Angeles's Angeles Flight . Arcadia Publishing , Mt. Pleasant, SC 2008, ISBN 978-0-7385-5812-7 , p. 125.

Coordinates: 34 ° 3 '4.9 "  N , 118 ° 15' 0.8"  W.