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Circa 1915. "Mount Adams incline, Cincinnati, Ohio." One of five "Cincinnati incline" railway elevators serving that city's hillside suburbs. 8x10 inch glass negative. View full size.
The Mount Adams Incline wasn't noteworthy for carrying streetcars, since four of Cincinnati's five inclines did that. The exception was Price Hill, which had a separate passenger-only plane and open platform freight plane. Mount Adams was noteworthy, however, for being the only incline to carry city trolleybuses and motor buses in its waning years (Price Hill did occasionally carry private motor buses on its freight plane in the 1920s).
https://www.jjakucyk.com/transit/streetcarinfo.html
Also at the bottom of the photo is a remnant of the Miami and Erie Canal. Ten locks were required to descend the 3/4 mile distance to the Ohio River now occupied by Eggleston Avenue. Since canal barges can't navigate the river, and the numerous locks made this a tedious section to traverse, it was abandoned in about 1863. After that time the canal terminated on higher ground near today's county courthouse.
Rookwood Pottery is still visible on the left on the mountain.
in HO scale: maybe only 1/87th the size, but definitely a lot more than 1/87th as exciting!
All of Cincinnati's inclines are long gone. The Mount Adams was noteworthy in that it carried streetcars up the incline, and traces of the right-of-way can still be discerned today. But any hopes of reconstructing it are but a dream, since the area at the foot of the incline is now a tangle of limited-access highways.
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