Photo by Brice Crandall, San Francisco Railway Museum.
After an extended absence, the most exotic looking PCC streetcar in Muni’s fleet is carrying passengers again, working the F-line shuttle run from the Wharf to the Ferry Building yesterday (Saturday, February 15, 2014), after a prolonged absence waiting for some parts specific to the car, followed by operator training, led by Muni’s Robert Parks.
You can read all about this streetcar here. The slender design (just 7’3″ wide, almost two feet narrower than the F-line’s widest cars) was needed for narrow European streets. This car was built for and ran its whole life in Brussels, but after it got to San Francisco, then-Mayor Gavin Newsom asked that it be painted to honor San Francisco’s sister city of Zurich, Switzerland, which ran skinny trams of the same general body type (though not with the patented PCC components designed by an American group of transit leaders, called the Presidents’ Conference Committee, in the mid-1930s).
The juxtaposition of a livery that honors a Swiss city coupled with an interior that still has signs in French and Flemish, Belgium’s two languages, is understandably confusing, so we’ve taken to referring to No. 737 as the “Euro-PCC” to cover all the bases. It’s fun to ride, so start looking for it on the F-line.
