The funicular has operated on two slightly different sites, using the same cars. The first Angels Flight operated from 1901 until it was closed in 1969 when its site was redeveloped. The second version opened nearby in 1996, and closed again in 2001 after a fatal accident. This second version began operating again on Monday, March 15, 2010 after being out of service for nine years. The cost of a one-way ride is currently 25 cents.

The first Angels Flight

Built in 1901 with financing from Colonel J.W. Eddy, as the Los Angeles Incline Railway, running northwest from the west corner of Third and Hill Streets, Angels Flight consisted of two carriages pulled up a steep incline by metal cables powered by engines at the top of the hill. As one car ascended, the other descended, carried down by gravity. The two cars were named Sinai and Olivet. An archway labeled "Angels Flight" greeted passengers on the Hill Street entrance, and this name became the official name of the railway in 1912 when the Funding Company of California purchased the railway from its founders.

The first Angels Flight was a conventional funicular, with both cars connected to the same haulage cable. Unlike most more modern funiculars it did not have track brakes for use in the event of a cable breaking, but it did have a separate safety cable which would come into play in case of breakage of the main cable. It operated for 68 years with a good safety record.

The only fatality that occurred in the first Angels Flight took place on September 1, 1943, when a sailor attempting to walk up the track was crushed beneath one of the cars.

In November 1952, the Beverly Hills Parlor of the Native Daughters of the Golden West erected a plaque to commemorate fifty years of service by the railway. It read:

Built in 1901 by Colonel J.W. Eddy, lawyer, engineer and friend of President Abraham Lincoln, Angels Flight is said to be the world's shortest incorporated railway. The counterbalanced cars, controlled by cables, travel a 33 percent grade for 315 feet. It is estimated that Angels Flight has carried more passengers per mile than any other railway in the world, over a hundred million in its first fifty years. This incline railway is a public utility operating under a franchise granted by the City of Los Angeles.

The railway was closed in 1969 when the Bunker Hill area underwent a controversial total redevelopment which destroyed and displaced a community of almost 22,000 working-class families renting rooms in architecturally significant but run-down buildings, to a modern mixed-use district of high-rise commercial buildings and modern apartment and condominium complexes which imposed an inappropriate suburban design in what historically had been a dense urban area. All the components of Angels Flight were placed in storage in anticipation of the railway's restoration and reopening.

The second Angels Flight

After 27 years in storage, the funicular was rebuilt and reopened in 1996 a half block south of the original site. Although the original cars were used, a brand new track and haulage system was designed and built, a redesign which had unfortunate consequences five years later. As rebuilt, the funicular was 91 meters (298 feet) long on an approximately 33-percent grade. Car movement was controlled by an operator inside the upper station house, who was responsible for visually determining that the track and vehicles were clear for movement, closing the platform gates, starting the cars moving, monitoring the operation of the funicular cars, observing car stops at both stations, and collecting fares from passengers. The cars themselves did not carry any staff members. Angels Flight was added to the National Register of Historic Places on October 13, 2000.

On February 1, 2001, Angels Flight suffered a serious accident that killed passenger Leon Praport, 83, and injured seven others, including Praport's wife, Lola. The accident occurred when car Sinai, approaching the upper station, reversed direction and accelerated downhill in an uncontrolled fashion to strike car Olivet near the lower terminus.

The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) conducted an investigation into the accident, and determined that the probable cause was the improper design and construction of the Angels Flight funicular drive and the failure of the various regulatory bodies to ensure that the railway system conformed to initial safety design specifications and known funicular safety standards. The NTSB further remarks that the company that designed and built the drive, control, braking, and haul systems, Lift Engineering/Yantrak, is no longer in business, and that the whereabouts of the company's principal is unknown. The founder, Yan Kunczynski, moved to La Paz, Mexico, to avoid any possible prosecution, and is in the process of selling the YANTRAK facilities in Carson City, Nevada. He is also working on desalination technology.

Unlike the original, the new funicular used two separate haulage systems (one for each car), with the two systems connected to each other, the drive motor and the service brake by a gear train; it was the failure of this gear train which was the immediate cause of the accident as it effectively disconnected Sinai both from Olivet’s balancing load and from the service brake. There were emergency brakes which acted on the rim of each haulage drum, but due to inadequate maintenance the emergency brakes for both cars were inoperative, which left Sinai without any brakes once its physical connection to the service brake was lost. Contrary to what might be expected, the new funicular was constructed with neither safety cable nor track brakes, either of which would have prevented the accident; the NTSB was unable to identify another funicular worldwide that operated without either of these safety features.

Records indicate that the emergency brake had been inoperative for 17 to 26 months due to the fact that a normally closed hydraulic solenoid valve had been placed in a location where the design called for a normally open valve, and that the regular analysis of oil-samples was discontinued in May 1998, despite the fact that the company performing the tests recommending that the rising particulate level in the oil samples warranted the test occurring more frequently. During the 17 to 26 months that the emergency braking system was not operating, the braking system was tested daily, but since the service brake and emergency brake were tested simultaneously, there was no way to tell if the emergency brake was functioning without looking at the brake pads or hydraulic pressure gauges during the test. The test was always performed with the Sinai car traveling up-hill, which meant that when the power was cut and the brakes applied (as part of the test), Sinai’s momentum caused the car to continue moving up-hill a short distance (slackening the cable) and then to roll back from gravity, jerking the cable tight. If the emergency brakes had been functional, then they would have caught Sinai when the cable snapped tight, but without the emergency brakes, the force of the jerk caused by the daily test was directed through the spline (the part that failed) and to the service brake. In addition, it was found that the original design called for the spline to be made of AISI 1018 steel on one drawing, and of AISI 8822 steel on a different drawing, but it is unlikely that this ambiguity in the design contributed to the accident.

Besides the design failures in the haulage system, the system was also criticised by the NTSB for the lack of gates on the cars, and the absence of a parallel walkway for emergency evacuation. The funicular suffered serious damage in the accident.

The death and injuries could have been avoided if any one of the following had taken place:

•  The 1996 renovation had included installing track brakes or safety cables.
•  The biannual oil analysis tests had not been discontinued in May of 1998 (which would have shown rising levels of particulate material in the oil and may have caused a full inspection of the system to take place).
•  A single haulage system, similar to the first Angels Flight, had been used rather than the system that had separate cables for each car.
•  The emergency brake hydraulic solenoid valve had been installed according to the design (as normally open).
•  The technician installing the solenoid valve had contacted the engineer for a new design when the solenoid did not fit, instead of forcing it in with pliers (A valve with the dimensions called for in the design was no longer manufactured, and tool marks on the valve show that it was forced in).
•  The daily brake test had included testing the service brake and emergency brake separately instead of testing them simultaneously (which made it impossible to confirm that they were both working).
•  The daily brake test procedure had included looking at the brake pads and the hydraulic pressure in the emergency brake system to confirm it was operating.
•  The pressure gauges for the hydraulic brake systems had been placed on the operator's control panel instead of in the equipment cabinet.
•  The daily brake test had involved applying the brakes more gradually so that the up-hill-bound car would not have the momentum to produce slack in the cable and roll backwards, jerking the cable tight.
•  The splines (the part that failed) had been designed to be extraordinarily strong to withstand the excessive force that occurred when the brake test was performed and the emergency brake was inoperative (which resulted in the force of the cable being pulled tight to be directed to the service brake through the splines, rather than to the emergency brake which was before the splines).

On November 1, 2008, both of the repaired and restored Angels Flight cars were put back on their tracks and, on January 16, 2009, testing began on the railway.

On November 20, 2009, another step in the approval process was achieved. On March 10, 2010, the California Public Utilities Commission approved the safety certificate for the railroad to begin operating again.

Angels Flight reopened on March 15, 2010. A month after re-opening, Angels' Flight had had over 59,000 riders.

In popular culture

•  It appeared several times in the opening scenes of the 1953 color film The Glenn Miller Story in full operation.
•  Perry Mason (Raymond Burr) and Della Street (Barbara Hale) take Angels Flight in the Perry Mason television series in which Perry's car was "stripped." The 1966 episode, the only one of the original series filmed in color, was called "The Case of the Twice Told Tale."
•  In the 1966 movie, The Money Trap, Glenn Ford rides down Angels Flight while tailing the daughter of a suspect, with the camera showing the view as a passenger would experience it.
•  Angels Flight is shown in Robert Aldrich's Kiss Me Deadly (1955) and The Indestructible Man (1956). It is also seen in detail in The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed Up Zombies (1965).
•  Angels Flight was also the name and locale of a 1999 Harry Bosch crime novel by Michael Connelly.
•  There are references to Angels Flight in the song "Strange Season" on Michael Penn's 1992 album "Free-for-All," and the cover features images of the line and a ticket stating, "Good for one ride".
•  A scene in Hollow Triumph (1948) features Paul Henreid escaping from pursuers on one of the cars.
•  There is also a scene in Robert Siodmak's 1949 film noir Criss Cross where the gangsters are planning the armored car heist. Angels Flight's cars can be seen through a window going up and down, first in daylight, then in darkness, to illustrate the passage of time.
•  The funicular's debut on film was probably "Good Night, Nurse" in 1916, but it got its first reel close-up in a 1920 one-reel comedy of errors, All Jazzed Up, in which a bride honeymooning in Los Angeles can't stop thrill-riding up and down on Angels Flight. Her husband leaps from one car to the other to reunite with her at the end.
•  The opening scene of Impatient Maiden, directed in 1932 by James Whale of Frankenstein fame, is shot all around Angels Flight, including the Third Street steps and the Olive Street Station.
•  In the game Tony Hawk's American Wasteland, Angels Flight is a gap where the player can grind up or down the rails, the gap being called "Angel Going Up!" or "Angel Going Down!"
•  It was shown at the opening to an episode of Dragnet, with Jack Webb's voice-over: "...for five cents, ride the shortest railway in the world."
•  Angels Flight was also the name of a 1980's-1990's Hair metal band based in McKinney, Texas.
•  It was in the 1965 children's book Piccolo's Prank by Leo Politi.
•  Joseph Losey's 1951 film M features Angels Flight in several shots.
•  Angel's Flight is a low-budget 1965 film noir about a Bunker Hill serial killer, shot on and around Angels Flight in both the downtown and Bunker Hill neighborhoods.
•  There are at least five novels titled Angel's Flight or Angels Flight, all with scenes that take place on the funicular and use it as a symbol of some kind. The first novel, by Don Ryan, was published in 1927. The most famous was Michael Connelly's 1999 best-seller.
•  Among the novelists who included Angels Flight in their works are John Fante and Raymond Chandler. Chandler visited the funicular in The High Window (1942) and in the 1938 novella The King in Yellow.
•  Angel's Flight is the title of a famous 1931 oil painting by Millard Sheets that hangs as part of the permanent collection in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. It shows two young women on the funicular's upper platform looking down on the nearby houses of Third Street, but the funicular cars themselves are out of the frame.
•  It has been shown in the end credits of the soap opera The Bold and the Beautiful.
•  Angels Flight is used several times in the 1961 Kent Mackenzie film The Exiles, which dramatizes the lives of several real Native Americans living on Bunker Hill in 1958 (when the film was shot). The DVD of The Exiles also includes a short film, The Last Day of Angels Flight, taken on and around Angels Flight on the day it closed in March 1969, as well as a 1956 Kent Mackenzie short film called Bunker Hill: A Tale of Urban Renewal.
•  Angels Flight is described and mentioned several times in Linda L. Richards' "Death was the Other Woman" (Thomas Dunne 2007), a private-eye mystery set in the 1930's.
•  Edmund Penney's 15-minute documentary, Angels Flight Railway, shot in 1965 and during the funicular's last days in 1969, is a lyrical memorial to the landmark railway.