Sipping a coffee early on Friday, June 15 at the Starbucks next to our Pharr restoration facility at Market & Duboce, my peripheral vision picks up a flash of unexpected color on the F-line. It’s the intricate Cleveland livery of PCC No. 1075. Noteworthy, because I’ve already seen its San Diego and Detroit sisters go by carrying passengers, with the Birmingham car scheduled out as well.

Four of the ‘new’ PCCs on the street at the same time! It meant Muni maintenance had met the challenge laid down by Chief Operating Officer Ken McDonald, two weeks early: four of the refurbished ex-Newark streamliners were mandated to be in regular F-line service by July 1.

Later came the bad news. The foursome didn’t last long. The Cleveland car, in its first day of revenue service, broke down after just a few trips. Rear door problem.

Turns out that underneath the exquisite exterior paint jobs and the new-looking interiors of the Newark cars, their nervous systems border on the sclerotic. The wiring, which is original to the cars (meaning 60 years old), is causing some real problems.

This stems from decisions made well before the current top management, McDonald and his boss, CEO Nat Ford, came to San Francisco. As previously reported in Inside Track, when Muni purchased the eleven PCCs from Newark (which in turn had bought them from Minneapolis-St. Paul in the early 1950s), the goal was to get them in service as quickly as possible to help alleviate overcrowding on the F-line. But contract changes, added scope, and other delays dragged out the renovation process.

It is somewhat ironic that new wiring wasn’t included in the upgrade of the ex-Newark PCCs. When the F-line was being conceived, Muni passed up its own retired PCCs, whose history they knew intimately, in favor of retired cars from Philadelphia’s SEPTA agency. A major reason given at the time: the Muni cars still had their original wiring, while the SEPTA cars had been rewired within the preceding ten years. But once the selection of the SEPTA cars had been made, Muni staff wrote a renovation spec that called for full rewiring of the cars anyway, removing the SEPTA cars’ advantage over the retired Muni PCCs, which were wider and had far less body rust than the SEPTA cars turned out to have.

In the contract to upgrade the Newark cars, some additional electronic components were added, and others were changed out. After the cars arrived in San Francisco, Muni staff performed additional work on the cars. It is possible that at some point the old wiring became strained in spots on at least some of the cars.

As Inside Track went to press in late June, it was not clear how extensive the wiring problems on the Newark cars might be. Indeed, at least one of the cars—No. 1078, representing San Diego—has been on the line almost daily. And after its balky start, No. 1075 made it back on the street within a few days as well. However, unofficial word had it that discussions had started in Muni about putting together another contract to completely rewire the cars.

Whatever happens going forward, the overall experience with the Newark cars to date offers a cautionary tale already. While the idea of putting the cars in service quickly might have seemed appealing at the time, the city’s contract process, notoriously slow, probably precluded that option anyway. Now Muni’s new leadership has to live with a product that may not prove reliable, especially frustrating since the original F-line PCC fleet, mostly the SEPTA cars, has been run very hard and is already overdue for overhaul. Market Street Railway has renewed its pledge to Nat Ford and Ken McDonald to help identify solutions to this issue, once its full scope is known.