If you live on Mount Washington and you've ever timed a trip downtown around the Monongahela Incline, you've probably had the experience of checking your phone at the top station and seeing the same three words: service is suspended. That happened again this past May, when two riders spent two and a half hours stuck in a stalled car overnight before Pittsburgh EMS carried them down in a high-angle rope rescue. It's a dramatic story, but if you've lived up here a while, it wasn't really a surprise. The surprise is what else was happening at the same time, just a few months earlier, on the other route off this hill.
Most residents think of the Mon Incline and the light-rail tunnel underneath the hill as two separate systems serving two separate kinds of trips. One is a 19th-century funicular that hauls tourists and commuters up and down Grandview Avenue. The other carries the Red and Blue light-rail lines between South Hills Junction and Station Square. But they meet at the same spot, Station Square, and in 2025 they were both compromised within months of each other. That overlap, not the incline's mechanical quirks on their own, is the part worth understanding if you actually live here and depend on getting off this hill on a schedule.
The Incline's Track Record, Laid Out
Start with the incline itself, because the pattern matters more than any single incident. Going back to August 2023, Pittsburgh Regional Transit has pulled the Mon Incline from service at least six separate times, and not for the same reason twice:
- August 2023: A dozen passengers got stuck, and PRT attributed it to condensation buildup inside the mechanical system.
- January 2024: The incline shut down on January 3 after malfunctions kept the cars from braking properly at the stations. PRT extended the closure into a multi-week repair.
- February 2024: Days after reopening from that five-week closure, a door issue on the west car put it back out of service again.
- November 2024: PRT closed the incline for a planned few days to replace the safety cable, a component the agency says it swaps out every six to eight years.
- November 2025: A failed motor controller stopped both cars mid-run, trapping 27 people for more than three hours. The closure stretched three weeks, and PRT timed the reopening to land the evening before Light Up Night.
- May 2026: A control-system malfunction stranded two riders overnight, triggering the rope rescue, an indefinite shutdown, and a required Pennsylvania Department of Labor and Industry inspection before it could run again. PRT confirmed the reopening on May 13.
Six disruptions in roughly thirty-three months works out to a closure roughly every six months on average, and that's before counting the ordinary short stoppages that never make the news. PRT CEO Katharine Kelleman has been straightforward about why: keeping a 150-year-old machine running means constant intervention, not a one-time fix. She's also mentioned that the only hate mail she's received since joining PRT in 2018 came the one time she suggested the agency could stop operating the incline altogether.
Why the Ridership Numbers Change the Story
Here's the detail that reframes all of this. PRT puts total incline ridership at roughly 600,000 trips a year, and about half of those riders are tourists. That means the other half, somewhere around 300,000 trips annually, are locals using it the way you'd use any transit line: to get to work, to catch the light rail at Station Square, to a doctor's appointment downtown. When the incline goes down for three weeks, roughly half its riders lose more than a scenic photo op. They lose a transportation option they treat as infrastructure, not a novelty.
That's a different math than the tourism-brochure version of this story, where the incline is framed purely as a photo opportunity with a gift shop at the top. For a Mount Washington resident, it's closer to a bus line you can't always count on, and the difference matters when you're planning how to get to a 9 a.m. meeting.
When Both Routes Off the Hill Went Dark Together
This is the part that doesn't show up in the incline's own history, because it isn't the incline's story alone. In February 2025, PRT closed the Mt. Washington Transit Tunnel, the underground link that carries the Red and Blue light-rail lines between South Hills Junction and Station Square, to replace track, roadway, and the overhead electric lines inside it. The agency's own project page originally scoped the work at about eight months. Instead of holding that line dark, PRT rerouted the Red and Blue trains onto old streetcar track through the neighboring Allentown business district, sending them along East Warrington and Arlington avenues rather than under the hill.
As of late November 2025, nine months into the closure, PRT still hadn't given riders a firm date to move the lines back, according to reporting from PublicSource, which quoted a PRT spokesperson saying an update would come after Thanksgiving. When PRT did set a target, it landed on December 25, putting the total closure at roughly ten months.
Station Square is where this actually touches Mount Washington. It's the shared hub: the incline's lower station sits across the street from it, and it's also where the light rail continues on toward the South Hills through that same tunnel. For most of 2025, anyone riding the incline down and planning to continue by rail toward the South Hills found that connection running through Allentown's surface streets instead of straight under the hill.
Then the timing got worse. The Allentown reroute was still in effect in November when the incline's own motor controller failed on November 1, trapping 27 riders and shutting the incline down for close to three weeks. For that stretch, both pieces of infrastructure that meet at Station Square, the incline coming down from Grandview Avenue and the rail line continuing toward the South Hills, were running on backup plans at the same time.
Why the Duquesne Stays Quiet
A few blocks west on Grandview Avenue, the Duquesne Incline has had a noticeably calmer run. It opened in 1877, seven years after the Mon, and it's operated by a nonprofit, the Society for the Preservation of the Duquesne Heights Incline, rather than by PRT directly. Domenica Rifenburgh, who works the front desk at the Duquesne Incline, told student reporters at Duquesne University that even though the two inclines have been running for close to the same span of time, the Duquesne has kept its original cars while the Mon has swapped its out two or three times.
George DeBolt, a Pittsburgh tour guide who rides both regularly, summed up the difference this way: "Where the Monongahela Incline is a ride, its transportation, the Duquesne Incline is an experience." That's more than a marketing line. It points to something structural. The Duquesne isn't carrying the same commuter load or fielding the same maintenance demands as a publicly run transit asset that has to answer to ridership numbers, budget cycles, and a broader transit agency's priorities. It's a smaller, singularly focused operation with one job.
None of this means the Duquesne is immune to closures. It just hasn't made headlines the way the Mon has over the past three years, and residents who've defaulted to the Mon out of habit, since it's the incline closer to Station Square, might be better served treating the Duquesne as the more dependable option when timing actually matters.
What This Actually Means If You Live Up Here
None of this is a reason to give up on hillside living or the incline itself. It's a reason to stop treating either the incline or the tunnel as guaranteed infrastructure and start building in a real backup plan:
- Check PRT's status updates or the rider alerts on rideprt.org before a trip that actually has a deadline attached.
- If the Mon is down, don't assume the shuttle bus PRT runs between the upper station and Station Square will match the incline's speed. Build in extra time.
- Know the driving route down Grandview Avenue and through Duquesne Heights as your non-transit fallback, especially if you're heading somewhere with a fixed arrival time.
- If you're weighing the two inclines for a routine trip, the Duquesne's track record over the past three years has simply been quieter.
If you're the kind of Mount Washington resident who's lived through all six of those Mon Incline closures and can rattle them off from memory, you already know the rhythm of this hill better than most guidebooks do. The Mount Washington side of daily life up here has always come with tradeoffs for the view and the walkability, and knowing exactly where the friction points are is part of actually living here, not just visiting.
If the up-and-down of hillside transit has you thinking about what your home on the Mount is worth in today's market, Michele Leone can walk you through it directly. Get your instant home valuation and find out where your property stands.
