In 1890, engineers connected two English towns separated by a cliff; the water-powered railway still carries passengers more than 135 years later

Imagine a 500-foot cliff between two towns, and nothing but a grueling hike between them. Now think of the Victorians in 1890, having no electricity, gasoline, or coal, and still being able to solve that problem, with the help of gravity, two train cars, and the river water. That's not a thought experiment. It's the Lynton and Lynmouth Cliff Railway on the coast of England in North Devon that has been operating since Easter Monday in 1890. This wasn't a case of Victorians lacking better options; by 1890, coal power was the backbone of British industry and electricity was already arriving in Britain's towns; Lynmouth itself got one of the country's earliest hydro-electric plants that very same year. The railway's designers chose a water-and-gravity system deliberately, because it suited the site's steep gradient and abundant river flow, not because nothing else was available. The railway's upper waiting room was "the first of its kind in England" according to Historic England, the country's official heritage authority, and the structure still runs via water to this day.

A commute problem

Until 1890 there were two ways of travelling between the clifftop village of Lynton and the seaside village of Lynmouth: either by a hard climb or by hiring a donkey. Goods were shipped by boat and hauled up with packhorses. It was hampering trade and frustrating for the Romantic-era tourists like Wordsworth and Coleridge, who had already named the region "England's Little Switzerland.”

Promoters began pushing the project forward in the mid-1880s, and construction itself got underway in 1887, carried out under the arrangements the promoters had put together while their bill was still making its way through Parliament. It was only the following year, with royal assent granted in July 1888, that the Act of Parliament formally established the Lynmouth and Lynton Lift Company and gave it permission to abstract up to 60,000 imperial gallons per day from the nearby West Lyn River: construction beginning before the company's formal legal charter was common practice for Victorian infrastructure projects backed by private promoters, who would build under provisional agreements and then seek parliamentary ratification. The project was spearheaded by George Croydon Marks and funded by his business partner, the publisher Sir George Newnes. The brakes were designed by local contractor Robert "Bob" Jones, who went on to oversee the line's construction and maintenance through its first several decades of continuous operation.

The genius part: It is a giant see-saw

There's no motor. There are two cars on parallel tracks connected by steel cables, which are tied to steel pulleys at the top and bottom of the track. There are approximately 700-gallon water tanks for each car, slung under the car. Staff fill the upper car and then let the one in the bottom car go down the hill, which pulls the other car up it since they are heavier. The water at the bottom is released, and the cycle is repeated. It takes only 2 minutes to travel the length of the track; each car can accommodate about 40 passengers and the entire system operates with an average gradient of 1-in-1.75. No diesel, no electric wiring, no plug-in overnight.

It's not just a tourist brochure mumbo-jumbo. The railway was awarded an Engineering Heritage Award by the Institution of Mechanical Engineers (IMechE), the UK's chartered body for mechanical engineers, in 2014, alongside Tower Bridge and Concorde. The line was the first of its type and is now the oldest water-powered “total-loss” funicular in operation in Britain. That's a significant difference: total-loss implies no pumps or machinery are used to circulate water through it; it's just pumped out into the river with each pass, down by gravity generation after generation.

Why this matters

The railway's zero-emissions operating model may sound like a museum exhibit for a model built before the advent of the internal combustion engine. The Lynton and Lynmouth Cliff Railway remains in daily operation today, and is the UK's only fully water-powered railway and one of only three in the world. The public service bus is a comfortable 135-year-old form of transit that's available and doesn't require a power grid to get going. It won't resolve any debates in the United States about infrastructure. However, a good reminder that ‘green transportation' doesn't have to mean reinventing the wheel; sometimes just two buckets, a cliff, and a very patient river can make a difference.