We’ve been loving the decorated cable cars on the Powell and California lines this holiday season (see photo below). The idea of decorated cable cars actually goes back at least 65 years to the last desperate years of the California Street Cable Railway Company.
Intended just for our members, here’s a bonus from the 2014 No. 3 edition of Inside Track: rare motion picture film of streetcars on the 5-McAllister line, edited and narrated by Market Street Railway’s president, Rick Laubscher.
STORMAGEDDON! STORMPOCYLPSE!
Cable cars were invented by Andrew S. 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. He opened the world’s first cable car line, on Clay Street in San Francisco, in August 1873.
One hundred Thanksgivings ago, Muni was laying streetcar track at the spot you see here, and finishing up the Stockton Tunnel in the background, all to create the original F-line, the F-Stockton, which was initially built to carry crowds to the Panama-Pacific International Exposition.
