In 1885, Folkestone built a cliff railway powered by water and gravity; it carried 36.4 million passengers before closing after 132 years

There's a machine that has overcome the same challenge that Silicon Valley is trying to disrupt: how to get people up a hill without burning anything, and it's been somewhere along the English coast for more than 100 years. No battery pack, no charging station, and no software update. It's just water, gravity and a Victorian engineer's determination not to complicate things.

This is the Leas Lift in Folkestone, Kent, one of the most amazing cliff railways, powered exclusively by water to move over 36.4 million passengers between the town's clifftop promenade and seafront, before its closure for safety repairs. Built in 1885 by engineers Waygood and Co. and designed by architect Reginald Pope for Folkestone Lift Company, the lift is protected by the official body, Historic England, that safeguards historic sites in the UK. It is Grade II listed, meaning that it is what the British government says “please for the love of history do not destroy this” about.

How to run a train on tap water?


The Leas Lift's arrangement was that it had two connected cars on the same cable. To get the upper car to descend, workers would just pour water into the car's tank until it was heavier than the car below. The rest was done by gravity; the heavier car sank, thus dragging along the lighter one. The water was drained in at the bottom and the cycle repeated. No engine. No emissions. No monthly fee charged. That low-tech ingenuity is a thing of wonder, and it is one that many in the 2026 transit sector fail to comprehend.

The lift operated for well over a century, running through both world wars (closing only during the Second World War, when it served as a Home Guard lookout post) and a handful of repair closures, and was used to transport its 36.4 million passengers; according to the National Lottery Heritage Fund, which eventually helped fund its restoration, it was an "especially energy-efficient" operation. And it lasted long after the horse-drawn carriage, the steam train, two world wars, and the entire 20th century had passed with its basic mechanism essentially untouched.

So why did it stop?

Not because the idea was wrong, since a modern safety inspector got to a 19th-century machine. The lift has been closed since the UK Health and Safety Executive (HSE) ruled that there should be a secondary fail-safe braking system onboard before it could continue running, in 2017. It's been years in the making, and a volunteer group is now doing everything possible to restore it to service with the help of grants from the heritage community and a fundraising effort by the community. The math turns out to be a neat one: 132 years of service by a machine built from a handful of simple, purpose-built parts like cars, cables, pulleys and water valves, and can still be called "smart."

Why should this matter

The Lynton and Lynmouth Cliff Railway in Devon is one of the last water-balance funiculars still running the way the Leas Lift once did: no motor, no external power supply, just gravity and river water. Opened in 1890, it was billed as the world's highest and steepest water-powered cliff railway still in operation, and it marked 135 years of continuous service in 2025. According to a 2019 engineering survey, "The Four Remaining Water Balance Lifts in the UK," by David A. Cooper (LECS (UK) Ltd), which examines the Lynton & Lynmouth, Folkestone Leas, Saltburn and Machynlleth lifts, the funicular system has undergone essentially no change in over a century, because the "problem" to solve was a simple pulley system that had to move people uphill with as little energy as possible. It's simply a design so well suited to its job that there was never much reason to change it.

The mildly annoying news for those who've been doom-scrolling through headlines about e-bike subsidies and EV tax credits: the "clean transit" solution has been around before the light bulb was widely used in American households. It did not require any investment from the venture world. It required a hill, water, and a town that would take care of it. Folkestone is attempting to prove that's not the case. Whether it will reopen when it's supposed to is another matter; it seems that gravity is powerless against bureaucracy.