The Powell-Mason cable car line starts at Powell & Market Streets, and ends in North Beach, just a few blocks from Restaurant Row in the heart of Fisherman's Wharf. Here, cable car No. 9 wearing Market Street Railway Co. colors, crosses California Street on Nob Hill.

The two lines (Mason cars are marked with yellow signs, Hyde cars with red signs) share the tracks on Powell Street past Union Square and up Nob Hill, where they cross the California Street cable car line. (When you ride toward the Wharf on Powell, watch the gripman as you approach California Street. Because the California cable crosses above the Powell cable, the Powell cable must be dropped lest it slice the California cable in half. This has to happen precisely as the Powell cable car crests the hill, or it will slide backwards to Pine Street. It’s probably the trickiest maneuver a gripman has to execute on the system.)

Once California Street has been crossed, the Powell cable cars coast downhill without the cable for three and a half blocks, to a spot where the tracks split between Washington and Jackson Streets. Then, cars on each line pick up a separate cable to continue their trips to different parts of Fisherman’s Wharf.

Powell-Mason
The Powell-Mason line goes one block up Jackson, then lurches right onto Mason, which it follows along the eastern shoulder of Russian Hill into North Beach. It passes within one block of Washington Square, the park generally thought of as the heart of old North Beach (get off at Union Street). Once it reaches Columbus Avenue, the diagonal 'main drag' of North Beach, it takes a half-left for a long block, then swings half-right onto Taylor Street. Two blocks later, at Bay Street, the line ends in another turntable.

Since opening in 1888, the Powell-Mason line has run the same exact route with the same type of equipment and propulsion. That’s longer than any other transit line in the world. When the line opened, Bay Street was, well, where the bay began. But subsequent landfill means you have to get off and walk three blocks farther on Taylor to reach what’s generally regarded as the heart of Fisherman’s Wharf, where the fishing fleet is docked along Jefferson Street. (On the way, you’ll cross the F-line, which runs back toward Downtown along Beach Street).

The Powell-Hyde cable car line starts at Powell & Market Streets, and ends at the western end of Fisherman's Wharf, just steps from the famous Buena Vista Cafe, responsible for bringing Irish Coffee to America.

Powell-Hyde
The Powell-Hyde line parallels the Mason line for one block of Jackson Street on an odd 'gauntlet' track (two slots, two outer rails, one shared center rail.) It’s an ingenious solution to the requirement to accommodate separate cables pulling the two lines uphill on that narrow block. At the end of that block, Hyde cars drop the cable again as they cross the track that returns the Mason line to Powell from the Wharf. Hyde cars then retake the cable and climb past the cable car barn half a block uphill.

All three cable car lines use this track to 'pull in' at the end of the shift. It’s a sight worth watching. The car pulls past the pull-in switch, the gripman drops the cable, yanks on the brakes hard while the conductor jumps off and leans on the switch lever. The brakes come off and the car rockets backwards into the barn (without passengers of course) where it is flipped around on a turntable and pushed by a small tractor onto a storage track.

Once past the car barn, the Hyde line continues across Taylor, Jones, and Leavenworth Streets until it reaches Hyde. Until 1957, cable cars on this route continued west on Jackson another eleven blocks into the heart of tony Pacific Heights, terminating at Alta Plaza Park on Steiner Street, then returning via Washington Street. But in the 'rationalization' of the cable car system (see cable car history), the old Washington-Jackson line was cut back and connected with the outer end of the old O’Farrell, Jones, and Hyde line, which started operations in 1891. But since the Powell-Hyde line has now been in operation close to half a century, it’s probably time to consider it historic in its own right.

Many riders consider the thirteen block stretch of line on Hyde Street the most scenic and exciting part of the system. The cars run through the colorful neighborhood of Russian Hill, passing restaurants, shops, venerable apartment buildings and homes along the way. At Lombard, Wharf-bound Hyde cars pause while out-of-town riders gawk at the 'Crookedest Street in the World,' which twists downhill to the east. The cable car isn’t making a photo stop, though. Roadside signals tell the crew when it’s safe to descend the steepest grade in the cable car system, 21 percent, a loooonnnng two blocks from Chestnut to Bay Street, while riders drink in a soaring vista of Alcatraz, Angel Island, Mount Tamalpais, and the Golden Gate Bridge.

From Bay Street, it’s two more blocks to the end of the line, at Beach, the western edge of Fisherman’s Wharf. One block straight ahead is the Hyde Street Pier, where automobile ferries operated to Marin County before the Golden Gate Bridge opened in 1937. One of those ferries is preserved there along with other historic vessels as part of San Francisco Maritime National Historic Park. One block west is Ghirardelli Square, the first-ever set of historic buildings (chocolate and mustard factories) converted to a shopping center, back in the 1960s.

The return trip on Hyde departs from the turntable tucked inside Victorian Park, now part of the larger Aquatic Park. Many assume the turntable is very old. Actually, the old O’Farrell, Jones & Hyde line used double-end cars and a switchback, so there was no turntable at all until 1957, when one was constructed for the single-end Powell type cars in what was then a neglected vacant lot. The park around the turntable came later. The entire turntable area was reconstructed and somewhat altered when the cable car system was rebuilt in 1982-84.