By Rick Laubscher, Market Street Railway President
On April 1, 1921, an old name appeared anew in San Francisco. The dominant and much disliked transit company known as United Railroads of San Francisco morphed into Market Street Railway, a new company born from the rubble of “the United.” It took back the name of one of the companies that United Railroads had acquired twenty years earlier, a name that had belonged to other transit companies before that. Now, of course, that name belongs to the publisher of this magazine, founded in 1976 and named in honor of those earlier Market Street Railway companies. (We refer to our nonprofit as MSR and to the company we profile here as MSRy for brevity.)
United Railroads had built up a reputation for corruption and arrogance as the city’s dominant transit company, helping build support for a new idea in America: a “municipal railway”, a transit system owned by the citizens themselves. Muni, as it was already known, was just over eight years old, but was already a growing competitor to United Railroads, especially in the northern part of the city, and was building lines in the southwest quarter to take advantage of its new tunnel under Twin Peaks, which United Railroads tried and failed to gain access to.
But the reborn MSRy was still four or more times Muni’s size in 1921: it inherited 300 single-track miles of street railway (including an interurban line from Daly City to San Mateo), 716 electric streetcars on forty lines (Muni operated 197 streetcars on ten lines at the time); 56 cable cars on five lines; fourteen car houses, some sixty pieces of rail work equipment, and zero buses (Muni had nine buses in 1921).
The first few years of MSRy were hardly a transformation from the old United Railroads days, understandably so, since MSRy was still controlled by the same parent, United Railways Investment Corporation. Really the only visible sign of change was signage. The intertwined URR letters on the sides of the company’s dark green streetcars were replaced by sedate lettering reading MARKET STREET RAILWAY COMPANY. Routes remained the same. Employees kept their jobs. The fare was still a nickel. Car houses around town remained painted in the mix of colors dating back to companies URR had acquired over the years. Many riders persisted in calling the company “the United.” And ridership continued to grow modestly, despite the competition from Muni.
1925: Changes start
In Spring 1925, MSRy was continuing a program begun at the end of the United Railroads era: gradually replacing obsolete flush platform streetcars (single-level seating areas that required a climb up steep protruding steps to board) with lightweight cars featuring new steel and wood bodies and lower platforms at each end that were easier to board.
These new car bodies were built by employees at the company’s Elkton Shops (where Muni’s Green Light Rail Division is today, next to the Balboa Park BART Station), but with few exceptions, they reused old electrical equipment and trucks. By June 1925, 64 of these streetcars had been home-built, all painted in the company’s traditional dark green livery.
At this point, former URR executive Mason Starring, who had just started in the president’s chair at MSRy, decided a new look would benefit the company. California was celebrating its 75th anniversary of statehood that year, giving more prominence to the state colors of blue and gold. So, on June 12, 1925, MSR unveiled a car numbered 2001, as if jumping into a new century, eye-popping in its gold (actually bright yellow) paint with blue trim. It caused a sensation and was followed by thirteen more identical cars by the end of the year. The company took a poll of passengers. They preferred the bright yellow cars by a 7-1 margin over the old green. Market Street Railway had a public relations winner.
At which point they abruptly stopped.
Two weeks after the final “blue and gold” streetcar rolled out of Elkton Shops, the next car appeared in the old green livery, with one glaring difference. The ends were bright white, except for dark red window sash. The sides were the same as before: green with the red window sash. Making the ends even brighter, downward facing dash lights on the ends further increased the visibility of the streetcar, especially in contrast to the somber gray ends of Muni’s streetcars, which tended to disappear into the city fog. As if to say “we’re not looking forward any more,” the new “White Front” car was numbered 809, resuming the old sequence. The fourteen “blue and gold” cars were quickly repainted in the “White Front” scheme (soon patented as a safety feature) and renumbered into the old sequence.
Why pull the plug on a good thing? More than likely, it was tied to the most significant management change in MSRy’s history.
Enter Byllesby
In November 1925, while Mason Starring’s new “blue and gold” streetcars were rolling out of Elkton shops, control of MSRy passed to an out-of-state utility holding company, Standard Gas & Electric, and management was taken over by the Byllesby Engineering & Management Corporation. Byllesby installed one of its up-and-coming executives, Samuel Kahn, to essentially replace Starring. Kahn had managed other Byllesby utilities, but none as big as MSRy.
Perhaps the termination of the blue and gold streetcar program was imposed on Starring by Byllesby. Whatever the case, Kahn went all in on the green and white color scheme, giving the randomly colored car houses a consistent company look, even extending to a giant “San Francisco” painted on many of the carbarn roofs, with an arrow for airplane pilots pointing toward the city’s airport. He also took an old special event streetcar, painted it all white, and “dedicated” it to San Francisco schoolchildren. Named the San Francisco, this car carried kids from their schools all over town on free trips, including tours of the Elkton Shops, with streetcars under construction, lots of welding and painting and blacksmithing going on. Elkton was an awesome sight for kids.
These were two of numerous attention-getting gestures Kahn instituted, but the PR efforts never overshadowed the nuts-and-bolts work of running a railway. One early example: after Starring had purchased new Standard 0-40 trucks for the first Blue and Gold streetcars, MSRy under Kahn reverted to using second-hand trucks from scrapped cars under the new bodies. Even in days of growing ridership, the 1920s, MSRy was a frugal outfit. Increasingly, it had to be.
Hitting the peak
The Byllesby management takeover of MSRy coincided with the City’s second attempt at a takeover of its own. The City Charter of 1900 called for eventual public ownership of all utilities; a very progressive stance at that time. In the 1910s, the City approached URR about a possible buyout. URR President Jesse Lilienthal was in favor of it, but the parent company’s owners in Chicago wanted more money, and the effort died when Lilienthal did in 1919.
Then, in November 1925, voters were asked to buy MSRy for $36 million (about $650 million in 2025 dollars) and consolidate it with Muni. The Board of Supervisors thought that price was too high, and by a margin of 7 to 1, voters agreed, squelching the plan.
As it turns out, 1925-26 would be MSRy’s busiest years, carrying just under 200 million riders each year, with revenues just short of $10 million (more than $180 million in 2025 dollars). That’s a lot of nickels.
Kahn and his management team believed that five-cent fare wasn’t fair any more: it hadn’t changed in 50 years. Yet they were boxed in by Muni, which as a city agency didn’t need to turn a profit for investors and stuck to its nickel fare. Muni also didn’t have to worry about franchises—the renting of rights to operate on city streets—and many of MSRy’s most valuable franchises were due to expire in 1929. Finally, of course, there was the rise of private automobiles. The boom times of the “Roaring ’20s” enabled more and more working-class families to join richer San Franciscans in owning a personal car. No need to take a streetcar to the Park or Sutro Baths on Sunday or wrestle with shopping bags on the streetcars during the week.
This same trend affected Muni, but the City-owned operation wasn’t weighted down with unprofitable lines that had to be operated under the franchise system, lines MSRy inherited from URR. MSRy wanted to shed some of these lines, but only succeeded when the City had an interest in getting streetcars off a particular street, which is why City allowed MSRy’s archaic Montgomery Street service through the financial district to be terminated in 1927. (Or nature could intervene, as when the popular 1-line around Land’s End slid into the Golden Gate in 1925, ending that very scenic service.)
Muni by contrast was still investing, opening the N-Judah line through its new Sunset Tunnel the following year, providing faster service to that growing part of town than MSRy’s competing 7-line on Haight Street and Lincoln Way.
Muni also made early use of small motorbuses to feed riders into the outer ends of their streetcar lines starting in 1918. Bus ridership was low, but Muni only had to pay one operator per bus, versus two per streetcar. MSRy followed Muni in 1926 with two bus lines in the Excelsior and Crocker-Amazon neighborhoods, feeding its Mission Street streetcar lines.
But Kahn knew a few bus lines wouldn’t fix declining ridership, which by 1928 had fallen two percent from its 1925 high, troubling given the continued economic boom. He got rid of the Pacific Avenue cable line in 1929, the last line using dummy and trailer cable trains, after years of resistance by rich Pacific Heights residents who considered it their private service. (See rare sound newsreel footage of this relic here: streetcar.org/vintage-videos.) Kahn also managed to abandon three unprofitable shuttle lines that had only warranted a single streetcar to serve them.
Second life
MSRy could have lost a lot more at the end of the 1920s with the expiration of many of its most important franchises. City voters had already shown no appetite to buy the private company, but shutting down MSRy’s service was unthinkable. So, the City negotiated a deal that gave MSRy a 25-year operating permit for its lines while allowing the city to buy the private company at any time for fair market value.
With oblivion postponed, Samuel Kahn set out to start the 1930s on a positive note, making good on part of the deal with the city to build a new streetcar line on Balboa Street, the 31. It would be the last new streetcar line in the city for a half-century when it opened in 1932.
By then, though, financial storm clouds roiled the world of streetcars in America. The combination of private car ownership and Depression savaged revenues of transit companies around the nation beginning in 1930. Neither Market Street Railway nor Muni would escape.
We’ll cover the final years of MSRy in a future story.
Three photos above: Market Street Railway token, good for one full fare, with the signature of its longtime president, Samuel Kahn; two billboards on the fence outside Market Street Railway properties, promoting the company’s streetcar services.
This article draws upon the excellent research of Charles Smallwood in his seminal history, The White Front Cars of San Francisco. We are grateful to our nonprofit’s historian, Emiliano Echeverria, for reviewing this story. His e-books, co-authored with Michael Dolgushkin, are available in our online store: San Francisco’s Transportation Octopus (covering the Market Street Railway Company of 1893), and San Francisco’s Trolley Titan: United Railroads, both filled with detailed information and rare photographs.
