In What Have We Learned? we discussed what we have learned since the first Trolley Festival 25 years ago about the pluses and minuses of various vintage streetcar types in F-line service. Now, we discuss what we’ve learned about operations over that period.
Judy Garland’s great singing made the 1944 movie “Meet Me in St. Louis,” about the 1904 World’s Fair. The film debuted two original songs with enduring popularity. “The Trolley Song,” as in “Clang, clang, clang went the trolley…” and “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas,” now a part of the holiday music canon. The film also produced … Liza Minnelli, because Garland met her future husband, Vincente Minnelli, on the set (he was the director).
(Hmmm … half a column already — not bad.)
Even though 2009 has barely started it’s already time to start planning for next year’s annual calendar. Last year we extended the invitation to submit photos for the calendar to our Flickr group as a contest. We had a lot of great photos to choose from and photos from both Tammy Abraham and Simon Batistoni are featured in this year’s calendar.
In 1901, the poet Gelett Burgess penned a poem that celebrated a cable car ride. Specifically, The Ballad of the Hyde Street Grip chronicled the feeling of riding what was then San Francisco’s newest cable car line, the O’Farrell, Jones & Hyde line, which had opened ten years before. The rule of that day was that any new cable car line was ‘inferior’ at the crossings to older lines, meaning that a gripman on the new line had to drop the cable at every crossing of an older line to keep the grip from slicing through the older line’s ‘superior’ cable, which crossed above the new line’s cable. Since the O’Farrell, Jones & Hyde line was the newest line of all, its gripmen had to drop the cable 22 times on every roundtrip, which is why Burgess wrote, “You are apt to earn your wages, on the Hyde Street Grip.”
Muni tries to pull its Milan “Peter Witt” trams in from F-line service by 9:00pm because of community complaints about their noise. No such restrictions in their hometown. Check out this incredible parade of various Milan trams, from twins of Muni’s Milanos to the latest seven-truck supertram.
SFMTA photo.
Fred Matthews photo, Walter Rice collection.
