Pittsburgh is the city that proves you don't need a building. Mount Washington's Grandview Avenue hangs 450ft above the point where the Allegheny and the Monongahela become the Ohio, and the city has bolted four concrete platforms out over the cliff face so you can stand past the edge of the hill. They're free, they never close, and USA Weekend once ranked this the second most beautiful place in America.
The way up is two funiculars that have been running since 1870 and 1877. That's the part worth planning.
Which incline, and where the farebox is
Take the Duquesne if you're choosing one. It's the postcard — it looks up both rivers at the confluence, the cars are 1877 originals, and locals will tell you flatly that the Mon is the utilitarian one. The Monongahela wins on logistics: light rail at the door, card payment, roomier cars, and Station Square at the bottom.
Now the thing no guide tells you. **The Mon collects fares at the top; the Duquesne collects at the bottom.** Ride the Mon up and nothing stops you at the lower station — you meet the farebox on arrival. It's the standard Pittsburgh convention: you pay at the end furthest from downtown.
And the money-saver: the Monongahela takes a $2.75 fare, but the $2.75 three-hour pass covers unlimited trips on *both* inclines. Ride up one, walk Grandview, ride down the other, and you've paid once — against roughly $8.50 doing it in cash. Bring exact change for the Duquesne regardless; it takes no cards and there's no ATM.
There is a cargo hold under your seat
Look at a Duquesne car from the side and you see a stepped wooden wedge under the passenger compartment — the geometry needed to hold a level floor on a 30.5-degree slope. It reads as structure. It isn't.
It's hollow, and it's a hold. The platform beneath the cars was built to carry groceries and produce for the passengers, so Mount Washington residents could send their shopping up the hill underneath them. It's still there, under the floor you're standing on.
The machinery at the top is the same vintage and still original: a twelve-foot cast-iron drum, three foot ten wide, with both cables winding onto the single drum — because the hoisting gear was installed at right angles to the slope to avoid buying another parcel of land. A nineteenth-century property economy is permanently frozen into the shape of the machine. The drive gear's teeth are individual pieces of rock maple, and spare maple teeth sit on a shelf waiting to be fitted.
The neighbourhood bought it back
The Duquesne closed in 1962 and should have been scrapped. Instead the Duquesne Heights Civic Association formed a committee — its actual name was the Save the Incline Committee — and went door to door. Boy Scouts delivered flyers to every house on the hill. They sold souvenir tickets for a dollar and shares in the incline company for a hundred. They held bake sales and card parties. Local men did the repairs themselves.
A magazine article written that August, while the collection was still going, records the goal as $20,000 and notes plainly that it hadn't been met yet — which means they put the incline back into service before they had finished paying for it. It ran again on 30 June 1963 and opened to the public the next day.
The Port Authority bought it in 1964 because the law required it to acquire all mass transit, then leased it straight back to the Society for a dollar a year. Volunteers have run it ever since. In 149 years it has never killed anyone.
The reliability asymmetry Pittsburgh argues about
Here is the awkward comparison. The Duquesne — 1877 machinery, wooden gear teeth, volunteer-run — has an almost spotless record. The Monongahela had an $8.2 million overhaul finished in 2023 and has since stranded 27 passengers for three and a half hours in November 2025 and two more overnight in May 2026, the second requiring a high-angle rope rescue.
PRT now keeps a standing bus-replacement order on file covering the entire year, activated for any interruption, scheduled or not. That is an agency that has priced in the failure rate.
Both still run, both are worth riding, and if your day depends on a specific one being open, make it the Duquesne. Its CEO's own line on the Mon is the giveaway: the only hate mail she has received in seven years came when she once suggested the agency might stop running it.
Two more things while you're up there
The Mon's 2023 refit quietly installed glass floor panels along the edge of the upper station, looking straight down onto the working mechanism. It wasn't announced and almost nothing mentions it.
And the city steps that climb the hill beside the tracks are free to use — which the incline company found inconvenient enough that it put about a rumour the steps followed an old path and were haunted, to stop people walking up for nothing.