Ingleby Incline 2024

To explore the incline it is almost a mile long (1.6km) and the gradient is mostly 1-in-5 (20%), which meant steam engines couldn’t tackle the hill. The answer was an incline cable railway that used gravity to lower loaded wagons down the steep slope. It was built in just seven months in the 1860s by an army of navvies using gunpowder and picks to blast through the bedrock. If the cable snapped, the wagons could reach 113mph by the time they hit the bottom and cause absolute devastation.