San Francisco Staycation: Historic Streetcars

San Francisco is full of cable car souvenirs - snowglobes, keychains, pencil sharpeners, coasters, socks, puzzles, etc., etc. But in the many souvenir shops I subjected Steven to (mostly as he sat on a bench outside) I could not find one streetcar souvenir. That led me to the San Francisco Railway Museum, located wonderfully enough on the F Line. The F Line was my transit to and from work in the Financial District for five days. And every day, I boarded a different vintage streetcar. There are nearly sixty different types, according to my field guide (On Track: A Field Guide to San Francisco's Historice Streetcars and Cable Cars), which I only found at the said museum.

With the opening of a subway under Market Street, the above ground rail streetcars were "gravely threatened" with obsolecence. Civic activists rallied in the early 1980s to save the streetcar, holding streetcar festivals. In 1995, the F Line, which now runs from Fisherman's Wharf to The Castro, was back in business. Since then, the E line has also been added. Only in SF can you ride both a cable car AND a streetcar. And unlike a cable car, which costs three times as much to ride and is only half covered, the streetcar is part of the Muni system, a bargain $2.85 per ride, and fully covered, especially appreciated in SF's cold summers.

As the name implies, cable cars run on cables rotating beneath the street, which you can hear if you (safely) stand on the tracks. They were actually invented in SF in 1873. (See my separate post on the Cable Car museum for more fascinating details.) Streetcars came around about fifteen years later, with SF's first streetcar starting on Steuart Street (right where the SF Railway Museum is), in 1892. They run on steel rails like cable cars but connect via a trolley pole to overhead electric wire for power. After the 1906 earthquake, many cable cars were converted to electric streetcars, the streetcars were that good. In 1932, streetcar service peaked at 50 lines and 1,200 streetcars. Then in the late 1940's and '50's many streetcar lines were replaced with boring and polluting buses.

All the streetcars are vintage, the real deal. The oldest is the No. 578, built 1896. It's a bouncy single trucker that looks more like a cable car. This beauty did not fall on my route. Instead I rode streetcars built 1946-1948, used in SF, Kansas City, Boston, Philly, Los Angeles (yes, the city of cars), Newark, El Paso/Juarez (one of the few streetcars that crossed between the U.S. and Mexico), Washington, D.C., and Detroit. How do I know I rode all these? Because my guidebook had a checklist, and because there is a placard in each streetcar telling you all about the streetcar's origins.