Most people think of public transit as buses, subways, and trains. What Pittsburgh has is more unusual: a small cable car that goes straight up a hillside, carrying office workers and tourists in the same seat, every single day. It’s the Monongahela Incline. It opened in 1870 and still runs today as part of the city’s regular transit network, not as a museum piece for people to look at.
That difference is important. A study published in the Journal of Heritage Tourism, by researchers Abhishek Bhati, Josephine Pryce, and Taha Chaiechi, looked at how industrial railway heritage attractions evolve from working transport lines into visitor attractions, and what factors help them succeed as heritage tourism sites. The Monongahela Incline is a working example of that idea.
