00:08 - The Duquesne

00:09 - Incline opened on May 20th, 1877 as public transportation,

00:13 - which in fact it still is today.

00:22 - Well, the idea was to get people,

00:24 - for we lived up on Mount Washington, a Duquesne Heights down

00:27 - to the river where the, factories were, where they worked.

00:31 - And, the reason was that, your option back

00:35 - in 1877 was 1400 steps.

00:39 - There weren't any streets.

00:40 - And the only your only other option was horse and wagon.

00:43 - Without streets, horses were pretty useless.

00:46 - The incline is a very simple propulsion system.

00:50 - We have.

00:51 - Well, it started out back in 1877 as a steam engine

00:55 - hoisting the cars up and down the hill.

00:57 - But now, we got a brand new electrical system, Westinghouse

01:00 - Electric System, that was installed in 1932.

01:03 - And what that does is we have two cables.

01:08 - The one cable is a safety cable,

01:11 - and that connects to two cars, and it doesn't do much of anything.

01:15 - It does kind of are kind of goes along for the ride.

01:18 - One end of the cables attached to one car goes through a series of pulleys here,

01:23 - and it's attached to the back

01:24 - of the other car, and all it does is make the cars counter balanced.

01:29 - And that's good because they weigh about five tons apiece.

01:32 - So that takes ten tons of work load off of the hoisting equipment.

01:36 - The other important job it does, it really never had to do in 148 years.

01:43 - These are our hoist hoisting cables here.

01:46 - The one cable was for the car closest to us.

01:48 - We refer to it as the West car,

01:52 - and under the floor is the other cable.

01:54 - And that is attached to the East car.

01:57 - And, what happens is, as one cable is hoisting one

02:02 - car up the hill, the other one is lowering the other car down the hill.

02:05 - If we would lose one of those cables.

02:08 - And that's never happened in 148 years.

02:11 - You're still attached to the other car.

02:13 - The the safety cables.

02:16 - And one of those cables is strong enough to support the weight of both the cars.

02:20 - So I always tell people, you won't take that fast ride down

02:23 - the hill into the Ohio River.

02:26 - So basically,

02:28 - we have an electrical system which drives

02:31 - the drum for the the the gear which

02:34 - is connected to the drum, which lifts the cable up and down the hill.

02:39 - So as one cable is unwinding from the drum.

02:43 - The other one is actually taking its place on a drum so that save the engineers

02:47 - the time and expenses in having a second drum for the other cable.

02:51 - There's two points of entry for the Duquesne Incline.

02:54 - The upper station here, which is where residents who are commuters get on.

03:00 - They ride down to the bottom. Get off.

03:03 - They either put a dollar, $2

03:06 - or $0.50 in the fare box like you would on a bus or a trolley car,

03:10 - or they can swipe their bus pass as they would if they go out on a bus.

03:15 - Then when they come back, they would do the same thing to come back up.

03:19 - Visitors generally, come to our lower station,

03:22 - a park across the street at the parking lot, and walk up the,

03:27 - steps to the pedestrian bridge, cross over the highway safely and come in.

03:32 - And they stand there and they're greeted by the conductor,

03:35 - who is the person who conducts, who collects affairs.

03:38 - And, they have, basically it's a cash fare system

03:43 - because we are part of the transportation system.

03:46 - It's a bus.

03:47 - So there's a fare box there.

03:49 - You put your,

03:51 - $5 in the fare box.

03:53 - You want to do that because you can get around your pride.

03:55 - So you just show your receipt on the way back down,

03:58 - and you don't have to go through this process again. And,

04:02 - that's the simple way of

04:03 - getting a ride on the incline.

04:17 - Yeah.

04:18 - When you get to the top, we have a small museum with,

04:22 - pictorial history of Pittsburgh.

04:26 - Our sports teams,

04:28 - different events that happened here, from floods to,

04:32 - the Whiskey Rebellion, which took place here in western Pennsylvania.

04:36 - There is the, where we're standing now.

04:39 - You can overlook the hoisting equipment and watch,

04:43 - something that's 148 years old in operation is very interesting.

04:48 - We have the observation deck,

04:50 - where you want to stop and, take pictures of the Pittsburgh skyline.