Hope We Don’t Have to Return This Present

PCC No. 1071, painted to honor Minneapolis-St. Paul, testing recently on West Portal Avenue.

Yellow isn’t traditionally thought of as a year-end holiday color, but that Twin City Rapid Transit livery still makes for nice “gift wrap” for PCC No. 1071, which (fingers crossed) entered revenue service for good today. It has been here more than a year after having been completely rewired at Brookville Equipment Company in Pennsylvania, but as we’ve reported in our member newsletter, Inside Track, getting the new door controls to operate reliably has been a vexing problem, and a variety of other glitches has cropped up over time. The car entered F-line passenger service earlier this year on a trial basis, but was soon pulled off the street as unreliable.
Now, though, with more than 3,000 test miles on No. 1071, the Muni engineer and project manager have accepted No. 1071, and it has been carrying passengers on the F-line today. Other cars in this class currently being tested, and which soon may join the active F-line fleet, include Nos. 1074 (Toronto), 1078 (San Diego), 1079 (Detroit), and 1080 (LA Transit Lines). As these streetcars start carrying passengers, additional rewired cars already back in San Francisco will start the testing process, including Nos. 1070 (Newark), 1072 (Mexico City), 1073 (El Paso-Juarez) and 1040 (an original Muni streetcar, painted in the 1950s “Wings” livery). For the current status of all 16 streetcars in this rebuilding contract (and all the others as well), click here.
The delay in getting these streetcars into service is a major reason we’ve seen so many buses on the F-line of late. Service had been increased to run every five minutes in September on the premise that these streetcars would be ready then. So they’re needed just as soon as they’re ready.
We celebrate the “present” that 1071 represents for the F-line fleet, and really hope all the bugs are worked out of it and the other streetcars in this group now, so that there won’t be any need to take it to the “return counter” after the holidays.