Text 1: The ninety-second ride that keeps Kelsham Bay moving, by Lydia Fernley

An original contemporary online feature.

Between the high street of Kelsham Bay and its beach there is a sandstone cliff a hundred and twenty feet high, and two ways to deal with it. You can walk down the 186 steps, or you can pay two pounds and take the cliff railway.

Most people take the railway. Its two little cars, built in 1890, run on parallel tracks joined by a steel cable over a wheel at the top. Each car has a water tank underneath. The top car’s tank is filled until it is heavier than the bottom one, and as it rolls down it hauls the other one up. No engine, no fuel, just a stream piped from the hill. The trip takes ninety seconds.

The railway carries around two hundred thousand passengers a year. ‘For a lot of people it’s the only way they’d ever get to the sand,’ says Mark Penhale, who has driven the cars for twenty years. ‘Pushchairs, wheelchairs, people with bad knees, families with a cool box and three bodyboards.’

Café owners on the seafront say a closed railway means an empty beach. The railway also employs eight people in summer, and children who have ridden it a hundred times still press their faces to the front window on the way down.

Text 2: Opening of the cliff railway, by Our Own Reporter

An original newspaper report written in a nineteenth-century voice; a period simulation, not an archival document.

This report of the opening of a water-powered railway up a cliff at a seaside town appeared in a local newspaper in 1890.

The new cliff railway at Kelsham Bay was opened on Saturday, and before nightfall had carried upwards of two thousand passengers between the town and the sands.

Until now the beach could be reached only by a zigzag path and a long flight of steps cut in the rock, a journey which, though pleasant enough going down, was a severe trial coming up. Invalids, elderly persons and nursemaids with perambulators were entirely shut out from the sands, and many visitors, we are told, preferred other resorts on that account.

The two cars each carry eighteen persons and are worked by the weight of water alone, the upper car taking in water from a reservoir until it overbalances the lower. The engineer, Mr Trevaskis, assured the company that each car has three separate brakes, and that the cable would bear twenty times the weight it is ever likely to carry. Some ladies were nevertheless observed to close their eyes upon the descent.

The fare is one penny up and a halfpenny down. The proprietors of the hotels upon the cliff top, who have subscribed liberally to the undertaking, confidently expect a larger and a better class of visitor.

Using information from both texts, explain briefly why the cliff railways were useful to people.

You should make it clear which text you are referring to.