In 1885, Lisbon built a cable railway up one of its steepest streets; the Glória line later became a national monument and carried about 3 million passengers annually

For 140 years, two mustard-yellow cable cars ferried tourists and office workers up and down the same 275-metre stretch of cobblestone on one of the steepest hills in downtown Lisbon. That run ended in September 2025, when one of those cars derailed mid-descent, crashed into a building, and killed 16 people. But the cause was not something bound to happen with 140-year-old engineering; it was a steel cable that had been installed less than a year earlier, was not certified for use on public transport, and was not fitted according to the manufacturer's own instructions, according to a 2025 CNN report citing the official preliminary investigation. Old bones didn't kill the Glória. A shortcut in modern times did.

A solution to a 19th-century dilemma

The Glória exists because of two things: Lisbon's hills, which make San Francisco look lazy, and 19th-century engineers who had one brilliant idea, letting gravity do the job. Raoul Mesnier du Ponsard, the Portuguese engineer who devised the system, first used water tanks, then steam, so that a car going down pulled another up the hill; the line was converted to electric power in 1914, the year of his death.

It's gorgeously understated, the sort of low-tech, high-efficiency solution that took a few years to get to the States in a couple of hilly cities (hello, Pittsburgh and Seattle). The Glória was not a museum item in the early 2000s when it became the national monument of Portugal. It was working, carrying some 3 million riders annually, more, by some counts, than an entire modern streetcar system like Tampa's carries in a year.

The uncomfortable trade-off

The appeal of heritage infrastructure is its lack of "modernization," and that same absence of modernization is what keeps people from asking the hard maintenance questions. Academic researcher Josephine Pryce has written directly about this conflict in her book chapter titled “Safety on the line: balancing authentic experiences against risks and hazards,” in Railway Heritage and Tourism: global perspectives, which asserts that the very same characteristics that make historic railways feel "authentic" also make them dangerous places to ride: something people would never put up with if it were supposed to feel timeless.

In this instance, it's not an abstract academic issue. The cable that broke on the Glória was new. The oversight wasn't. And that hole is the failure mode that modern engineering standards are designed to prevent: shiny replacement part, old assumption that “it's always worked before”. The American National Standards Institute's 2025 safety code for funiculars sets out requirements in detail for just this type of component: certification, installation procedures, inspection regimes and more. Practically nothing of this is a throwback. Everything is dull, and that's what makes people survive, it seems.

Why should this matter

All of the cable cars of San Francisco, the historic streetcars of New Orleans, the funiculars from Pittsburgh to Chattanooga share the same nostalgia that the Glória sells, and all are under a gentle pressure to maintain that feeling of the past while their grungy undersides are overhauled by the contractor who won the maintenance race that year. More than a year after the crash, the Glória still isn't running as it once was: Carris, Lisbon's transit operator, announced in August 2026 that the historic line will be replaced entirely by a new, certified system, with service expected to resume in 2029. What is important, for Lisbon and for any other city that cannot do without an historic component, is whether ‘historic' will continue to be synonymous with ‘safe.'