AN ELEVATED RAILROAD

Seventh-day Adventist Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Sep 16, 1880

AN ELEVATED RAILROAD.

THE railway up the sides of Mount Vesuvius, just completed, runs along a road steep as a ladder of a fire-escape and 869 metres in length; but as regards danger, it is reduced to a minimum. It is not a train in which the passenger travels, but a single carriage, carrying ten persons only, and as the ascending carriage starts, another, counterbalancing it, comes down from the summit, the weight of each being five tons. The carriages are so constructed that, rising or descending, the passenger sits on a level plane, and whatever emotion or hesitation may be felt on starting, changes, before one has risen twenty metres, into a feeling of perfect security. Dismounting at a little station at the summit, you can scarcely be said to clamber to the edge of the crater, for the company have cut a convenient winding path, up which all except the aged, heavy, or feeble can walk with ease.