A Streetcar Named Preservation

It’s a startling sight to see a vividly painted old-fashioned streetcar marked Los Angeles, Chicago, or Newark rumbling past you in San Francisco. But the story behind how these vintage streetcars ended up in the City by the Bay is as charming as the cars themselves. 

The city and Market Street Railway, a nonprofit dedicated to preserving historic transit in San Francisco, rescued decades-old electrified streetcars from all over the U.S., plus Italy, Australia, Switzerland, Canada, Japan, and Germany, and resurrected them as part of the F line, which travels Market Street and the Embarcadero to Fisherman’s Wharf.

At tram stops, I often wait in suspense, curious which city’s car will be hurtling toward me. Will it be a banana-yellow beauty from Cincinnati? Chicago’s green streetcar, a handsome dark blue one from Baltimore, or the El Paso-Juarez, Mexico car bearing the flags of both nations? Fingers crossed it’s my favorite: turquoise with flamingo-pink and sea foam trim, emblazoned “D.C. Transit” and “an affiliate of Trans Caribbean Airways.” (The owner of this Caribbean-hued vision also owned that airline, whose tickets were sold at Washington, D.C. streetcar stations.) To end the suspense, I just check the live cam map, which shows which streetcars are where, in real time.

Though San Francisco is one of only a few U.S. cities, along with New Orleans and Boston, that still employ historic streetcars, the vintage trams known as PCC streetcars once ruled the streets of North America. In the early 1930s, transit operators got together to design the sleeker, faster, and quieter trolleys (named for the Presidents Conference Committee, a group transit executives formed), and they ran in 33 cities in North America. After World War II, though, cars became king with the growth of suburbs, and the economics of public transit sentenced streetcars to death almost everywhere.

Decades later, in the 1980s and ’90s, Market Street Railway spearheaded San Francisco’s effort to save vintage streetcars in other cities from the dump, either by purchasing them or securing their donation. The city then painted the trolleys in colors their home cities’ fleets once used.

Founded in 1976, Market Street Railway serves as the nonprofit partner of the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Authority (otherwise known as Muni), which owns and operates the city’s vintage streetcars, modern streetcars, buses, and cable cars. It has drawn the support of fanatic rail fans like the late Maurice Klebolt, a peerless negotiator who acquired several streetcars from Milan, Japan, and Germany — including the city’s first historic streetcar from another country. 

A travel agency owner who never took no for an answer, Klebolt convinced Hamburg officials in 1979 to donate a streetcar, so long as he’d cover the shipping cost to the U.S. After easily raising the funds, he presented the Hamburg streetcar to the surprised Mayor Dianne Feinstein at City Hall. (Sadly, it hasn’t run for years because wheelchairs can’t fit through its door. It’s currently awaiting repairs to become ADA-compliant.)   

When Muni prepared to replace all its old PCC streetcars with new light-rail vehicles in 1982, Rick Laubscher, then the transportation committee chairman of the city’s Chamber of Commerce and now the president of Market Street Railway, along with the Chamber president, persuaded Mayor Feinstein to hold a Historic Trolley Festival the next year instead and lease antique streetcars from other cities to showcase them as a viable means of transport. 

Conceived as a one-time event, the festival, which let the public ride the vintage streetcars, was so popular, it led to other Trolley Festivals and ultimately the permanent F line, Laubscher says. At the festival, a “boat tram” from Blackpool, England, so delighted crowds thanks to its open-topped, canoe-like shape, that San Francisco later acquired two more of them. 

The metal streetcars are very different from the city’s famous cable cars. Named National Historic Landmarks in 1964, cable cars are wooden and much older than the streetcars; they celebrated their 150^th anniversary in 2023. In addition, while streetcars run on rails with overhead wires, cable cars are pulled along the street by a conductor operating an underground cable embedded in the street and travel different routes, over steep hills. It also costs less to ride the streetcars: $3 per ride, to the cable cars’ $8.

Together, though, the streetcars and cable cars make the city’s public transit system stand out from that of other cities. “San Francisco has been a great transit city for over 150 years. Our city is proud of its historic transit vehicles, which are truly museums in motion,” Laubscher says.

The city is unlikely to get new streetcars, Laubscher says, as it has all it needs for current and projected operations, with almost 20 unrestored streetcars in storage. But Market Street Railway and Muni will continue to promote and celebrate the streetcars at events like Muni Heritage Weekend, an annual event in September, when it offers free rides on special streetcars that don’t normally run, like the boat tram, and at the San Francisco Railway Museum, where visitors can learn about the city’s railway history and even buy vintage streetcar designs on coffee mugs, T-shirts, posters, and prints.