Photo courtesy Muni Diaries; click to enlarge. And no, we don’t know the complete wording of the tattoo.
Well. Tough to know where to start on this one. We know lots of streetcar fans, including many who REALLY love a particular vehicle. Our friends at Muni Diaries shared a photo of a tattoo last year of Muni PCC No. 1010. But at least that streetcar serves the F-line daily, meaning hundreds of thousands of people have seen and/or ridden it, and have some basis for being smitten.
But today’s Muni Diaries feature, showing 1912 Moscow-Orel Russia tram No. 106, takes this to a new level, since the streetcar hasn’t appeared on the street at all since the San Francisco streetcar centennial parade of 1992, and only barely saw service in the final Trolley Festival in 1987. (It’s a long-term restoration project of ours…so long-term that we don’t have a web page for it yet…but we can tell you that it was a gift to Mayor Dianne Feinstein from the then-Soviet Union, and needs a ton of work, including disabled accessibility modifications and a full body and mechanical renovation before it could operate.)
Yet someone, identified only as Alex in the story, loves No. 106 enough to embellish his forearm with it. It’s possible he saw it at our restoration facility at Market and Duboce where it was kept for years. Recently, though, it and our highest-priority project, Market Street Railway Car No. 798 were moved under cover, so it’s not in public sight any more. That facility has experienced numerous break-ins in the past year, apparently by scavengers and/or homeless people who have slept on the property and vandalized those two streetcars, so we felt it prudent to get them out of harm’s way until the day funds can be raised to complete its restoration. Maybe we should sell tattoos…
