Over the years, we’ve gotten a lot of suggestions for additions to the F-line fleet. But never one quite like this.
The suggestion – true story – came to Muni from an email address they didn’t recognize, so they sent it on to us. It contained a link to an interesting page with more pictures and the history of the thing. Maybe the email is from President Mededvev, and this was supposed to be a gift to San Francisco. Do you think we ought to accept it? What should we do with it?
That would have been a sweet ride!
On straight tracks.
If you don’t mind noise.
And heat.
And you don’t care about fuel efficiency.
A really frickin’ sweet ride indeed!
(I recently got to ride a replica of Stephenson’s Rocket in London. Damn, that was a sweet ride!)
There would be no need to reroute or ban automobile and truck traffic off Market Street, that thing would clear it out.
I think it would look great outside the museum along the embarcadero, Static of course. Or squeeze it n the metro tunnel and race BART!!!!
Eh. Not a streetcar in the truest sense, so it’s not appropriate for the “F” line no matter how interesting it might be. Maybe out in Rio Vista…
If it only ran once in tests, it probably vibrated badly or destroyed the operator’s hearing (which probably wouldn’t have been an issue in the Soviet era). Ah well.
There have been several additional comments submitted that are very earnest in nature, describing what “we’d” have to do to get it to work here, like changing the track gauge and so on. For the sake of avoiding embarrassment to the writers, we’re not planning to post them. Either they didn’t get that we were trying to be light-hearted when we asked “should we accept it?” or, perhaps, they were involved in writing the original email to Muni suggesting the car — which we all took as a joke. Oh, well.
Sounds like a Russian version of the jet-powered RDC that was tested on the New York Central back in the 1950’s. It was an interesting curiosity.