In 1900, Paris built a railway up Montmartre Hill so visitors could avoid the climb; the tiny funicular carried 3.6 million passengers in 2025

Paris is a city built on hills, and Montmartre is its steepest one. Its narrow lanes climb sharply toward a white basilica perched above the rooftops. In 1900, the city solved a very human problem: no one wanted to climb up hundreds of stone steps just to get to a church. So it built a shortcut. The Montmartre funicular opened on 12 July 1900, according to RATP, the Paris transport authority that runs the line, though some historical accounts put the date a day later, on 13 July. The little railway was built to help visitors reach the Basilica of the Sacré-Coeur, whose construction had begun in 1875 and was still years from completion.

A shortcut older than the metro itself

The funicular almost beat Paris to its own bigger transport story. It was more than a decade after work on the Sacré-Cœur began that the Council of Paris approved the funicular railway in 1891. Construction moved quickly once approved, and the railway opened just a few days before Metro Line 1 started operating on 19 July 1900, which carried its first riders during the 1900 World's Fair. Despite its outsized reputation, the funicular is a short ride: RATP lists the track at just 108 meters, rising 36 meters in elevation. In other words, this little railroad offered one of Paris's first experiences of modern city transit, before the metro opened.


Water, not electricity, did the heavy lifting

The first funicular was actually operated without any kind of motor whatsoever. Each of its two carriages sat on top of water tanks embedded in the floor. At the top station, workers filled the tank of the descending carriage until it was heavier than the one waiting to climb. Then gravity did the rest, pulling the loaded carriage down and dragging its lighter twin up a common cable. The line was quickly taken up by riders: within its first years it was already carrying close to a million passengers a year.

Rebuilt twice, but never out of service for long

Since the water system was found too dangerous in 1931, it was shut down. In 1935, the City of Paris launched the electric system, which shortened the ride to 70 seconds. The passenger flow kept growing. During the 1950s, the funicular served 1.2 million passengers per year, and in 1989, 2.3 million passengers, says RATP. It shows how the funicular had become an integral part of the daily routine for the people living on the hill and not just a tourist attraction. In 1991, the funicular was redesigned once again, for the third time, with two independent cabins being installed instead of a single cable. It allowed work to continue on one side while maintaining the other, and larger cabins were able to transport more passengers on peak days.

A small ride with a bigger transport lesson

Currently, the number of passengers transported is higher than ever, increasing to 3.6 million by 2025 according to data from the RATP. It still takes just over a minute to travel, and the cost is the same as that of a regular metro fare. Researchers who study funiculars have an explanation for why this century-old technology has lasted.

As Lijana Maskeliūnaitė writes in her 2024 review in the journal Transport, funiculars generally consume little power since they rely on the balancing of the weights of two trains during their movement, and the simplicity of the mechanism makes it durable despite decades of regular usage. Montmartre's current setup is a partial exception to that principle: since the 1991 rebuild, its two cabins run independently on their own drive systems rather than counterbalancing each other, which is why RATP itself describes the line today as a funicular in name only. That efficiency has proved useful beyond Paris in lines that still use the traditional design. In a study of the hillside railroads of Valparaíso, researchers Simón Castillo and Waldo Vila Muga found that the funiculars served a socially mixed ridership, including working-class hillside neighbourhoods, years before city buses reached those same hills in the 1920s.

Still climbing, more than a century later

Even though the funicular has been restored, renovated, and now has new contactless payment card readers installed, it performs the same function. It still spares tourists from climbing up the 222 steps of the Rue Foyatier stairway running alongside it. Besides, it still runs on the same ticket as all the other RATP transport lines, which costs €2.55 as of mid-2026. In 2026, the RATP decided to temporarily pause the operations of the funicular for the mandatory ten-year checkup. The cabin was lifted by crane to the southern side of the line, completely taken apart and assembled again, and then put back in place. Aside from that scheduled pause, the funicular goes on carrying millions of riders up that same short slope every year. For a machine that started out with nothing but water tanks and a cable, that sort of staying power says a lot about good, simple engineering.