You have to go back about 100 years — to the hair-raising rides on the Mount Lowe Railway — to experience the last mass transit ride from Pasadena to the San Gabriel Mountains.

On April 7, the next one begins.

Though not quite an E-ticket ride like the one provided by Lowe’s incline railway, this one also gets you to Pasadena via light-rail and then to the trail entrance in Altadena by bus for a hike up to the mountain named after the inventor and transit pioneer, Thaddeus Lowe. Lowe’s funicular from Rubio Canyon and railway ran up the San Gabriels front range from 1893 to 1936 and carried 4 million passengers before it was shut down.

The new bus service will connect from the Gold Line train’s Memorial Park Station in Old Pasadena to the Sam Merrill Trailhead at the north end of Lake Avenue at a site known as the Cobb Estate, said Daniel Rossman, Southern California director for The Wilderness Society, one of the sponsors.

Once on foot, hikers will crisscross the face of the mountain range, climbing into the higher elevations of the Angeles National Forest, passing the remains of the railway and the hotel Lowe built where visitors ate pies, drank beer and played tennis and rode his railway to get to and from the mountain retreat. The site is still popular for picnics and watching the sunset.

The six-month pilot program will run from April 7 to Sept. 30 at a cost of $72,000, according to Los Angeles County Supervisor Kathryn Barger.

Funding comes from three different sources: Edison International gave $12,000; city of Pasadena, $12,000 and Los Angeles County added $48,000, said Tony Bell, the supervisor’s chief of communications. The county dollars were approved Tuesday by the Board of Supervisors and will come from Barger’s discretionary transit funds, Bell said.

“This exciting partnership expands access to open space recreation and provides another option to improve regional transit connectivity for our residents in the Altadena community,” Supervisor Barger said in a prepared statement.

The shuttle service will be provided by Pasadena Transit Authority, Bell said. The fixed-route bus will run on Saturdays and Sundays between 7 a.m. and 5 p.m.

“It is definitely one of the many connections we were hoping for along the Gold Line,” said Belinda Faustinos, executive director of Nature For All, supporter of open space and part of the Enviro-Metro group planning for permanent, low-cost transit connections to not only the Angeles National Forest, but the Santa Monica Mountains and the local beaches as well.

It will be the third attempt at building a car-less way to enter the San Gabriels, a goal of the collaborative group working with the U.S. Forest Service to increase access to the Angeles National Forest and the 342,177-acre San Gabriel Mountains National Monument.

The first, launched by the city of Duarte in April 2016, was a free shuttle from the Duarte/City of Hope Station to Fish Canyon, where a 4.8-mile round trip trek takes hikers past a tri-level waterfall. The Duarte-Fish Canyon shuttle was shut down after a fire in June 2016 closed the trail but is expected to reopen soon, Faustinos said.

The second, started by the Forest Service, was a short-lived shuttle service in October 2016 from the Arcadia Gold Line Station to Chantry Flat, a popular hiking spot with a single, crowded parking lot.

Each one is a step toward providing access to the mountains to those without a car, Rossman said. He said conservation groups are looking for funding to restart the Chantry Flat shuttle.

Faustinos is talking to the city of Arcadia for a connection to the San Gabriels from its Gold Line station, she said.

The Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority is expected to adopt a transit-to-trails plan in August that will provide permanent funding for shuttles and buses into open spaces within the county, she said.

“We have to get out of our cars more and use public transit,” she said. “But we must make sure the public transit it reliable.”