Editor’s Note: 2018 marks the 35th anniversary of the first San Francisco Historic Trolley Festival, the demonstration project led by now-MSR president and CEO Rick Laubscher that proved the value of historic streetcars in regular service on Market Street and led directly to the creation of the permanent F-line, which is now the most popular traditional streetcar line in America. The following is excerpted from remembrances Rick shared with Inside Track on the 20th anniversary of the first Festival, in 2003, updated to include subsequent events. With a couple of exceptions, the photos in this story have never been published.
By Rick Laubscher, Market Street Railway President
Many people don’t realize that both the F-line, and the E-line were formally proposed before the first Trolley Festival took place. A 1976 book entitled Mirror of the Dream proposed a waterfront streetcar line from Caltrain to Fort Point, using self-propelled replica vintage vehicles and the existing State Belt and Army freight tracks. That vision was joined by a Muni planner of the day named Gerry Cauthen, and by 1980, both an E-line (to Fort Mason) and an F-line (the length of Market Street) had been included in Muni planning documents.
In the fall of 1982, as Muni prepared to start full time service in the Muni Metro subway beneath Market Street, their planning team (led by MSR co-founder Peter Straus) put together special service for several weekends, running Muni’s flagship Car 1 and 1923 ‘Iron Monster’ 178 (leased from the Western Railway Museum in Solano County) on Market and Church Streets. Some saw the service as a harbinger of a future F-line; others saw it as marking the end of streetcar service on the surface of Market forever.
This two-car service was popular with railfans, but not frequent enough to convey the vision of a permanent line to residents and visitors along the line.
But the special service gave the author, who then served as chair of the Chamber of Commerce Transportation Committee, an idea. The cable cars were about to be shut down for a 20-month rebuilding. Why not expand the two-car weekend service into a summer-long event that could be promoted as an “alternative transit attraction” to the cable cars?
Easier dreamed than done, as it turned out. The author put together a plan to lease several vintage streetcars and add a couple more Muni cars, and gained critical support from the late John Jacobs, then the Chamber’s president. Together, they went to see Mayor Dianne Feinstein, who heard their pitch and said, memorably, “All right, but I don’t want to see any junk out there.”
Enthusiasm and suspicion
As the Chamber began spreading the word about the proposal, the concept was met with both enthusiasm and suspicion. Many in Muni were dubious, even outright hostile, but the arrival of über-railfan Harold Geissenheimer as general manager drove that hostility underground (so to speak). Work began on a ‘temporary’ service pit and storage area at Market and Duboce, where the N-Judah surface tracks in the shadow of the US Mint were no longer needed. Shop forces went to work on preparing historic streetcars as they arrived, and began converting work car 0131 back to its original configuration as passenger car 130.
Meantime, some residents of the Castro neighborhood expressed skepticism over a proposal being put forward by the Chamber, which was in those days largely identified with large downtown employers. The author met with concerned community members and neighborhood businesses to be sure they were fully involved in planning and were positioned to benefit from the ridership of the line. Neighborhood residents were awarded commissions for official Trolley Festival merchandise, including t-shirts and posters, and created their own neighborhood poster as well. Alan Lubliner of the Mayor’s office, and the late Lee Knight of the Chamber were very helpful with both neighborhood relations, and a wide range of other important activities that made the first festival a reality.
All the while, the author was beating the bushes for vintage streetcars. A trip to New Orleans yielded hope of borrowing a famed St. Charles Avenue “Perley Thomas” car, but the City Council wouldn’t let one go. (San Francisco finally got one through the efforts of Mayors Willie Brown and Marc Morial fifteen years later.) Visits to eastern museums focused on a New York “Third Avenue” car and a Montreal trolley, but again, agreement could not be reached. But other efforts were successful, including lease of three cars from a party in Oregon and purchase of a recently retired W2 class tram from Melbourne.
Adventures in transport
Getting the streetcars to San Francisco proved to be an adventure. The author was awakened at 3:00am one day by a distraught Paul Class, en route from Oregon. He had almost decapitated Porto, Portugal car 189 on a Nimitz Freeway overpass. The car wasn’t damaged, but he was shaken and wanted help to get the car safely across the Bay Bridge. Another streetcar, Milwaukee 978, leased from the East Troy museum in Wisconsin, began sagging badly on the road near St. Louis. Turned out to be badly corroded underneath (a common problem with historic streetcars from snowy areas, we learned). It finally got here, but wasn’t streetworthy and had to be returned. (Thankfully, the Chamber had insured it.)
The last ingredient was the operating and maintenance team. As mentioned, some in Muni believed the historic cars shouldn’t be mixed in traffic with the then-new Boeing LRVs, and opposed running single-end cars either out the J to 30th Street or the N to 30th Avenue (there was only a temporary crossover on 17th Street near Castro the first year, so only double-end cars could terminate there). Others just plain thought the idea was stupid.
Fortunately, there were plenty of ‘can do’ people at Muni, too, including both veterans of the old ‘Iron Monsters’ (Muni’s first streetcar fleet, parts of which ran in service until 1958), and younger employees excited by the prospect of working on these antiques.
Two Muni veterans ran the daily operations: Carl Barton as overall manager, and Rino Bini as front-line inspector. Many veteran operators gave up higher-paying runs in the Metro subway in favor of the Trolley Festival cars, including Jack Smith, Chip Palmer, Tom Biaggi, Walt Thomsen, David Strassman, Lee Butler, Ray Fontaine, Jim Fine, Ray Walker, and Joe Batiste. Warren DeMerritt oversaw maintenance, with Karl Johnson applying his deep knowledge of historic streetcars to day to day maintenance, joined by Don Troya, Larry Fried, Ben Lam, and Wally Linn.
And operating (figuratively) in his own inimitable manner here there and everywhere, was the eminence grise of the Trolley Festival, Maurice Klebolt, lifelong railfan, travel agency owner, continuing contributor to the city’s politicians, and part-time Muni operator. Klebolt’s name was given to the author very early in the festival planning process, as someone both knowledgeable and powerful, someone who must be on the team.
Klebolt proved invaluable in solving any number of problems, moving matters forward by blustering, cajoling, wheedling, whatever it took. He even had his own streetcar, a 1954 Hamburg tram he had imported without Muni authorization in 1979 and ‘presented’ to Mayor Feinstein, in an attempt to jump-start the E-line concept.
Successful launch
Following much frantic last-minute activity by both Muni and its Chamber of Commerce partner (whom the author served as project manager), it all came together on June 23, 1983, when Mayor Feinstein gave a brief speech at 17th and Castro Streets, then wound up the controller of Car 1 and led a parade of vintage streetcars, buses, and other vehicles down Market Street to Transbay Terminal, officially opening the first San Francisco Historic Trolley Festival.
Many of us also expected it to be the last—a one-year demonstration project to show that vintage transit vehicles could meet today’s everyday transit needs. To keep costs down, it was a one-shift service: eight hours a day, five days a week (Wednesday through Sunday from about 10:30am to 6:30pm.) It ran through late September and ended with what some considered a farewell parade.
But the Festival proved so popular with locals and visitors alike, Mayor Feinstein asked that it be repeated again, on a longer schedule. Additional cars were found to replace the ones that had only been leased for one year, while other cars on hand—including Klebolt’s Hamburg tram—were restored to operating condition. Again in 1984, success, so much so that the Festivals continued every summer through 1987, with steadily expanding hours of operation.
Point proved
By that time, the value of historic transit on San Francisco’s main street had been indisputably established, and plans and funding were in place to begin construction of the permanent F-line. Advocating and staging the Trolley Festivals carried an element of risk. Had ridership been poor, or had Castro residents not embraced the service as warmly as they did, it could have doomed a permanent F-line. There was, after all, a strong element inside Muni at the time who wrote the F-line idea off as a ‘toy train.’ Even after Market Street construction was nearing completion in 1995, a senior Muni official (who has since left the organization) openly bragged that he was going to “kill” the Embarcadero section, despite repeated votes by Muni’s governing body and the Board of Supervisors to build it. But in the end, it moved forward.
Up to the present
As is well known now, the Market Street segment of the F-line opened in September 1995 and immediately shot way beyond ridership expectations. When the Embarcadero extension opened in 2000, the same thing happened. The original order of fourteen restored PCCs, which some planners thought would be plenty for the extended line, turned out to be only about one-quarter of what was needed. Since the 1995 F-line opening, the fleet of restored PCCs has grown to 32 cars, plus ten 1928 ‘Peter Witt’ trams from Milan, Italy, and several operable vintage streetcars, plus more being prepared for renovation and others preserved for future restoration if necessary. According to Muni’s Strategic Streetcar Plan, which Market Street Railway helped draft, the ultimate fleet of operable historic streetcars will one day number 56.
Market Street Railway doesn’t take this success for granted. Our board of directors recognizes that it comes as the result of ongoing dedicated work, most of it volunteer, constantly striving to demonstrate the value of historic transit in daily operation, constantly monitoring the planning, political, and financial processes of City government to identify bottlenecks and help keep improvements to the City’s historic streetcar service on track.
Looking forward
Even though the F-line provides a happy look backward in transit, we continue to look forward, striving to stay on top of needs and challenges and not resting on our laurels. In a future article, we’ll discuss those challenges and our response to them.
