Powell Cable Car 19 was built new in 1986 by Muni’s Cable Car Carpentry Shop. It is built in the style of the 1893 car built by Carter Brothers, which it replaced in the fleet. (It is not to be confused with the former Sacramento-Clay cable car of the same number, known as “Big 19”, which runs on special occasions.)
Powell Cable Car 21 was built new in 1992 by Muni’s Cable Car Carpentry Shop. It is built in the style of the 1893 car built by Carter Brothers, but the car it replaced was actually built for Mahoney Brothers in 1887 as part of the original Ferries & Cliff House Railway, and the Mahoney cars featured more complex, slightly taller roofs, with two rows of side windows in the clerestory .
Cable Car 22 has had three lives. First built as part of the original Powell Street cable car fleet for the contractors, Mahoney Bros. in 1887, it served the Sacramento-Clay line with its original number, 522, until the 1906 earthquake and fire. That cataclysm destroyed all the Powell cable cars, which were identical to those used on Sacramento-Clay at the time. Car 522 and its mates were moved to the Powell lines, and the owner at the time, rebuilt cable cars that had been used before the quake on Market Street to take over Sacramento-Clay. (One of these big 1883 cable cars survives, and you can ride it on special occasions.)
This car was built by the Ferries and Cliff House Railway in 1890, one of thee built in-house to augment the company’s original 1887 fleet of cars built for Mahoney Brothers, the system’s general contractor. It ran on the company’s Sacramento-Clay line, stored in a small barn at the outer end of the line. That saved the car on April 18, 1906, when the fire following the 1906 earthquake destroyed the entire fleet of Powell cable cars.
Car 24 is very special, for both historic and sentimental reasons.
The fiery red of this cable car is a reminder that Powell Street cable cars were painted this way on the day they went up in flames. It was April 18, 1906, when San Francisco was changed forever by the most devastating earthquake-fire combination in American history.
The first of several variations of Muni’s long-time green and cream paint scheme started appearing on Powell Street cable cars in 1946. The next year, Mayor Roger Lapham tried to scrap the Powell cable car system in favor of buses, but he was stopped by civic outrage orchestrated by the famed “cable car lady,” Friedel Klussmann.
This cable car was built in 1887 as part of the original Ferries & Cliff House Railway system, for the general contractor Mahoney Brothers. It features the “Bombay” roof style, with two rows of windows in the raised clerestory ceiling and eyebrow shaped windows at the end of the roof, a more complex design than the simpler roof on Powell cars built by the Carter Brothers in 1893.
Powell Cable Car 28 was built entirely new by Muni’s Cable Car Carpentry Shop while its predecessor was still in service, the only time this has happened. The new Car 28 entered service on January 2, 2004, and the old 28 was retired the same day and put into storage.
