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Going Up!
UNIQUE DESIGN: These circular compartments rotate as they go up the track to keep riders upright.
Last December, a record-breaking mountainside railway called the Stoosbahn opened in the Swiss Alps. It’s the world’s steepest funicular—a type of railroad that uses a system of motorized cables to pull a tram up a steep track. It goes up 762 meters (2,500 feet) in just under three minutes.
At the mountain’s steepest point, the tram moves up a 47-degree incline. To keep riders upright inside the funicular, engineers designed four barrel-shaped cabins that slowly rotate to counter the changing angle of the mountain’s slope. “The ‘wheel design’ has never been used before,” says a spokesperson for engineering firm Doppelmayr, which built the funicular. “But it will surely be more popular in the future.”
Only a handful of funiculars still operate in the U.S. Pittsburgh’s Monongahela Incline is the oldest—it has been continuously operating since 1870. This graph shows the inclines of some of these funiculars. How would they be ordered if you were to rank them from least steep to steepest?