On December 3, the San Francisco Examiner took note of Market Street Railway’s car cleaning activities, led by Market Street Railway director and former president Art Michel. The article, reprinted here by permission, highlights our growing outreach to volunteers from other nonprofit groups, and accurately portrays the pride they feel helping keep the F-line cars looking great.

Almost every weekday around noon, four or five people arrive at the corner where Market, Castro and 17th streets meet. Donning green jackets and caps adorned with a ‘Market Street Railway’ logo, they pull a variety of cleaning products out of a locker at the Municipal Railway stop and get to work.

As their jackets say, the group of volunteers is dedicated to ‘preserving historic transit in San Francisco’. The Market Street Railway group, named for the company that operated The City’s streetcars until 1944, does everything from restoring the historic cars that run on Muni’s F Line to cleaning them.

Most of the old vehicles come from either from 1940s Philadelphia or 1920s Milan, Italy, but some have been repainted to mimic cars in other cities during those same time periods.

“The bulk of the [volunteers] are just community members who are interested in supporting historic streetcar service,” said Art Michel, a retired Muni mechanic and head of the cleaning program, as he decorated the streetcars with Christmas wreaths.

But the program also offers disabled people the opportunity to garner work experience. Last Monday, five volunteers from Toolworks, Inc., which serves deaf and hard-of-hearing clients, were on hand, as they are twice a week, to help clean and sweep the old cars.

Rachel Cragen, 21, is one of those volunteers. Through e-mail, Cragen said the work is hard but fun. She was home-schooled and fairly isolated before this opportunity.

“I feel professional and cool when I wear [the] green coat with [the] green hat,” she wrote. “Bus drivers must be so proud of me because I did a good job [cleaning] all these dirty windows. I love to see bus drivers smile to me and say, ‘Thank you!’”

Representatives at Toolworks agree with the source of pride the work gives their volunteers.

“I think that the project really gives a lot of our clients confidence. They interact with the drivers and work quickly on the trains,” wrote Michele Friedner, assistant director of community integration at Toolworks. “In addition, for many of our clients, public transportation symbolizes independence... As such, this volunteer placement allows them an opportunity to interface with public transportation in a new and unique way.”

Muni drivers seem to welcome the break from maintenance as well. Most of them know the crews and greet them with a smile.

"We do appreciate it. They’re great,” 24-year Muni veteran Tom Gragasin said of the volunteers. “Without them, the tourists would probably say, ‘These are junk cars’... They do an amazing job."