We’re rolling out the red-and-green welcome mat for members and friends at our San Francisco Railway Museum the weekend before Christmas. There’s something appealing for all ages!
Family and Member Days at the Museum Dec. 19-20
Features
Back to the Future?
So begins a story in this morning’s Wall Street Journal, accompanied by a picture of tourists riding a St. Charles line streetcar. Small irony here: New Orleans was one of the last privately owned big-city transit systems in the U.S., a subsidiary of an electric utility until the 1980s.
A Wish Come True
Henry onboard New Orleans streetcar no. 952
Harvey Milk Remembered
Streetcars Get A New Life in San Diego
San Diego Vintage Trolley volunteers, including Market Street Railway members Dennis Frazier (second from right) and Dave Slater (right), pose with (left-right) Chuck Bencik, Ron Sutch, Harry Mathis – MTS Board Chair, and Art Aydelotte in front of the repainted nose of car No. 531 (ex-Muni No. 1170). Rick Laubscher photo.
What Have We Learned: Operations
In What Have We Learned? we discussed what we have learned since the first Trolley Festival 25 years ago about the pluses and minuses of various vintage streetcar types in F-line service. Now, we discuss what we’ve learned about operations over that period.
Meet Me in St. Louis
Judy Garland’s great singing made the 1944 movie “Meet Me in St. Louis,” about the 1904 World’s Fair. The film debuted two original songs with enduring popularity. “The Trolley Song,” as in “Clang, clang, clang went the trolley…” and “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas,” now a part of the holiday music canon. The film also produced … Liza Minnelli, because Garland met her future husband, Vincente Minnelli, on the set (he was the director).
Tales from the Grip: ‘Rookie bites’
(Hmmm … half a column already — not bad.)
The Ballad of an F-line Trip
In 1901, the poet Gelett Burgess penned a poem that celebrated a cable car ride. Specifically, The Ballad of the Hyde Street Grip chronicled the feeling of riding what was then San Francisco’s newest cable car line, the O’Farrell, Jones & Hyde line, which had opened ten years before. The rule of that day was that any new cable car line was ‘inferior’ at the crossings to older lines, meaning that a gripman on the new line had to drop the cable at every crossing of an older line to keep the grip from slicing through the older line’s ‘superior’ cable, which crossed above the new line’s cable. Since the O’Farrell, Jones & Hyde line was the newest line of all, its gripmen had to drop the cable 22 times on every roundtrip, which is why Burgess wrote, “You are apt to earn your wages, on the Hyde Street Grip.”
End of the Line, 1955
We’re going to post photos from time to time that we think are iconic in one way or another. The Ocean Beach terminal of the N-line is an iconic place in general, at least to railfans, with that lonely loop and mission-style shelter hard by the sand dunes that form the last barrier to the Pacific (if you don’t count the public convenience station). (The city knew that most folks would reach the beach by streetcar back when Muni built its Sunset District lines, so there are matching bathrooms and tunnels under the Great Highway at Judah and Taraval.)
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