The Falls Incline Railway, originally known as the Horseshoe Falls Incline is a funicular railway in the city of Niagara Falls, Ontario, Canada. It is located beside Niagara Falls at the Horseshoe Falls. The line was built in 1966 for the Niagara Parks Commission by the Swiss company Von Roll. It adopted its current name in the 1980s.
Unlike the other incline railways at Niagara Falls, the Falls Incline was not built to descend into the Niagara Gorge below the falls. Instead it links the Table Rock Centre and Journey Behind the Falls, on the Niagara Parkway just above the falls to the higher level Fallsview Tourist Area, including the Minolta Tower, the Niagara Fallsview Casino Resort and several hotels.
The Niagara Parks Commission claims that the funicular is the world's slowest.
The funicular has the following technical parameters:
- Length: 51.8 metres (170 ft)
- Slope: 30 degrees
- Cars: 2
- Capacity: 40 passengers per car
- Configuration: Double track
- Maximum speed: 1 metre per second (190 feet per minute)
- Journey time: 57 seconds
- Track gauge: 1.85 metres (6 ft)
- Traction: Electricity
Famous quotes containing the words falls, incline and/or railway:
“The light of heaven falls whole and white
And is not shattered into dyes....”
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)
“Many older wealthy families have learned to instill a sense of public service in their offspring. But newly affluent middle-class parents have not acquired this skill. We are using our children as symbols of leisure-class standing without building in safeguards against an overweening sense of entitlement—a sense of entitlement that may incline some young people more toward the good life than toward the hard work that, for most of us, makes the good life possible.”
—David Elkind (20th century)
“Her personality had an architectonic quality; I think of her when I see some of the great London railway termini, especially St. Pancras, with its soot and turrets, and she overshadowed her own daughters, whom she did not understand—my mother, who liked things to be nice; my dotty aunt. But my mother had not the strength to put even some physical distance between them, let alone keep the old monster at emotional arm’s length.”
—Angela Carter (1940–1992)