The cable cars that run today on Powell Street were built in three groups. The first group, in 1887-88, were built by several carbuilders in the Bay Area for Mahoney Brothers, who were the general contractor for the overall Ferries & Cliff House Railway Company system (F&CH). This first group of cars, augmented by six more built by F&CH itself.
The F&CH quickly expanded from its first two routes, Powell-Mason (same as today’s line) and Washington-Jackson (which ran through Pacific Heights until it was routed onto northern Hyde Street in 1957). F&CH took over the very first cable car line (Clay Street) and updated it to run from the Ferry ultimately to Golden Gate Park via Sacramento and Clay streets.
F&CH was taken over by the Southern Pacific-controlled Market Street Railway in 1893. They immediately ordered twenty more cars from Carter Brothers in the East Bay, in part to serve the 1894 Midwinter Fair in Golden Gate Park. While the original F&CH cars had roofs with two levels of side windows and half-moon windows, called “Bombay” windows, on the ends, the Carter cars had simpler deck roofs with a single row of clerestory windows. They would have been faster to fabricate.
Under F&CH, all its cable cars were painted in a standard livery, replicated today on Powell Car 1. Market Street Railway decided to color-code both its cable cars and streetcars by line. Mason cars were painted yellow (modeled on Powell Car 15 today); Sacramento-Clay cars were deep red (modeled on Powell Car 11 today); and Washington-Jackson cars were deep green.
The biggest change in the body during the Powell cars’ early life was the installation of front windows, required by the state in 1904. Forward-facing single seats on each side, flanking the gripman, were removed at this time, giving a body appearance that has changed very little since, with one exception mentioned below. Also, about this time, United Railroads, which took over the lines in 1902, began gradually painting all its cable cars in a dark green, using changeable dash signs in the colors of their former liveries to make identification easy.
On April 18, 1906, almost the entire Powell cable car fleet was incinerated along with the barn and powerhouse at Washington and Mason Streets (still in use today) in the great fire that followed the earthquake. Fortunately, 28 single-end cars stored on outer Sacramento Street survived. These cars, identical to those that had run on Powell before, were reassigned to the two Powell lines, with larger Market Street open cable cars rebuilt and partly enclosed for the Sacramento-Clay line (of which surviving “Big 19” returned to Muni’s active fleet after a 60-year absence in 2019).
The survivors on outer Sacramento Street included three single-ended open cars, which were enclosed in the 1910s and 1920s. (Two were fully replaced in the past twenty years; the third, Car 509, was retired intact and is in storage. We hope it will someday be restored as Open Car 542, its original number).
Since 1906, there have been only two significant visual changes to the Powell cars. One involved the side windows of the original Mahoney and home-built cars, which had short side windows topped by a letterboard that showed the car’s route. When the cars started serving multiple routes, the letterboards were redundant, with changeable signs mounted on the roof sides. When these cable cars started being renovated, they were fitted with taller windows. Many cars had the graceful curved-top side windows replaced by easier-to-make square windows, including Car 508 (now 8). Current practice is to replace square side windows with the original curved style during renovations, so that’s what the new Car 8 has.
The other change in appearance came in the 1920s, when roof vents were removed from the Powell fleet. These provided ventilation for the kerosene lamps that originally lit the interior of the cars, but were redundant when batteries were restored for lighting. When historian and cable car shop foreman Charles Smallwood oversaw the restoration of a Powell Car to its original look in 1973 to honor the centennial of the cable car’s invention, he fabricated nonfunctional vents that remain on that car (numbered Powell 1) today. While there has been occasional talk of adding them to other cars when restored, nothing has come of it.
The roof is the hardest part of a cable car to fabricate. For decades, when a car needed extensive renovation, Muni workers would hang the old roof from the building’s ceiling above the car frame and replace some (sometimes all) of the structure in between. As time took its traumatic toll on the original wooden roofs, though, most became too frail to save. After replacing the intricate “Bombay” style roof with simpler “Carter” roofs on a couple of Powell cars in the 1960s and 1980s, Muni adopted a policy of replacing or rebuilding Powell cars with the original roof type of that car. It has since fabricated both Bombay and Carter roofs from scratch, steaming the wood strips to shape in a timeless process.
This level of care and quality is a far cry from the way Muni treated the Powell cable cars after they took them over in 1944, a story we’ll cover in our quarterly magazine Inside Track.
