On October 26, San Francisco got a joyous reminder of just how important our cable cars are with a bell-ringing, bottle-breaking celebration of the 75th anniversary of the saving of the cable cars, in a grassroots campaign led by Friedel Klussmann, in an era when women had very little power in city political and economic life. (Here’s that fascinating story.)
In 1947, San Francisco almost lost its Powell cable cars forever. A women-led campaign overcame male-dominated government and business interests to save them. That is a great story in itself. But there’s more to it, including lessons for today and tomorrow.
San Francisco’s transit system, known as Muni, owns and operates a unique collection of vintage streetcars along the City’s main thoroughfare, Market Street, and its northeastern waterfront. Streetcars, known in other places as trolleys or trams, are different than cable cars, but both are fun to ride. Learn about the differences here.
Cable cars were invented in San Francisco in 1873 by Andrew S. Hallidie. Today, only San Francisco has street-running cable cars like these. The system is a National Historic Landmark. Scroll down this page to see every one of the cable cars in today’s fleet. Click on any image to learn the story of that individual car.
San Francisco has long been in the forefront of workers’ rights. This history extends back into the 19th century, but it was an event just one year after the San Francisco earthquake and fire of 1906 that shook the city all over again – one of San Francisco’s bitterest strikes that shaped the future of streetcar service in San Francisco and influenced the City’s labor movement in general.
Muni’s Cable Car Carpentry Shop has worked its magic many times in bringing sagging and spent cable cars back to life. Powell Car 8, which reentered service in 2022, may be its greatest accomplishment yet.
Cable cars were invented by Andrew Smith Hallidie, a Scots-born mining engineer. The story goes that he saw horses struggling to pull a railcar filled with passengers up one of San Francisco’s hills and decided to adapt his mining conveyor technology to pull rail cars, by means of an endless loop of cable under the street, between the tracks.
One of the oddest legacies of the twilight of the Cold War has to be this streetcar. It comes from perhaps the tramway capital of the world – the old Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.
This cable car was built in 1893 in the East Bay town of Newark by Carter Brothers. It served the Sacramento-Clay line until the 1906 earthquake and fire, and then was moved over to Powell Street, where it has run ever since. It was numbered 520 until Muni dropped the first number on Powell cable cars in the 1970s.
August 2, 1873 — In the wee small hours of a misty San Francisco night (they didn’t call the month “Fogust” back then, but it was), a new type of transit was about to be inaugurated. An endless wire rope clattered beneath Clay Street. An odd open vehicle sat on the rails at the top of the hill. Standing by was Andrew Smith Hallidie, a Scot who had experience using wire rope in the mining business, and was part of the team promoting this new technology, aimed at making horsecars obsolete.
