The great earthquake and fire of April 1906 destroyed virtually the entire Powell Street cable car fleet. To replace the Powell Street fleet, owner United Railroads used cable cars that had been working the Sacramento-Clay line and were stored outside the fire zone.
Powell Cable Car 14 was built in 1963 by Muni crafts workers at the old Elkton Shops at Ocean and San Jose Avenues. Then numbered 514, it replaced an original 1887 cable car built by contractors for Mahoney Brothers, who installed the Powell Street cable operation on a turnkey basis.
This striking yellow cable car displays the livery that Powell-Mason cable cars wore from 1893 to around 1905. It was recreated with help from our non-profit group.
When it bought out Market Street Railway in 1944, Muni’s official colors for its streetcars and buses were blue with yellow trim. Muni painted two Powell cable cars into this scheme (today’s No. 3 and No. 10).
This cable car was built in 1887 as part of the original Ferries & Cliff House Railway system, for the general contractor Mahoney Brothers. It features the “Bombay” roof style, with two rows of windows in the raised clerestory ceiling and eyebrow shaped windows at the ends of the roof, a more complex design than the simpler roof on Powell cars built by the Carter Brothers in 1893.
This cable car is currently being reconstructed at Muni’s Cable Car Carpentry Shop. When it re-enters service it is slated to be painted in the green and red livery with gray roof used by Market Street Railway Company from 1921 to 1926.
Powell Cable Car 19 was built new in 1986 by Muni’s Cable Car Carpentry Shop. It is built in the style of the 1893 car built by Carter Brothers, which it replaced in the fleet. (It is not to be confused with the former Sacramento-Clay cable car of the same number, known as “Big 19”, which runs on special occasions.)
Powell Cable Car 21 was built new in 1992 by Muni’s Cable Car Carpentry Shop. It is built in the style of the 1893 car built by Carter Brothers, but the car it replaced was actually built for Mahoney Brothers in 1887 as part of the original Ferries & Cliff House Railway, and the Mahoney cars featured more complex, slightly taller roofs, with two rows of side windows in the clerestory .
Cable Car 22 has had three lives. First built as part of the original Powell Street cable car fleet for the contractors, Mahoney Bros. in 1887, it served the Sacramento-Clay line with its original number, 522, until the 1906 earthquake and fire. That cataclysm destroyed all the Powell cable cars, which were identical to those used on Sacramento-Clay at the time. Car 522 and its mates were moved to the Powell lines, and the owner at the time, rebuilt cable cars that had been used before the quake on Market Street to take over Sacramento-Clay. (One of these big 1883 cable cars survives, and you can ride it on special occasions.)
This car was built by the Ferries and Cliff House Railway in 1890, one of thee built in-house to augment the company’s original 1887 fleet of cars built for Mahoney Brothers, the system’s general contractor. It ran on the company’s Sacramento-Clay line, stored in a small barn at the outer end of the line. That saved the car on April 18, 1906, when the fire following the 1906 earthquake destroyed the entire fleet of Powell cable cars.
