Keage Incline

The Keage Incline is a five-hundred-eighty-two-meter stretch of rusting iron railway tracks that climbs a gentle slope. Built in eighteen ninety-one as part of the Lake Biwa Canal system, this path once served as an ingenious solution to a geographic barrier. Because the water level dropped thirty-six meters between the canal and the Kamo River, engineers could not move boats directly. Instead, they built this massive inclined plane to haul entire vessels out of the water and onto wheeled cradles.