Last stop San Francisco: Where old streetcars go to retire

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The green-and-gold tram trundled down the road, a small Australian flag hanging out the driver’s window. I stared in amazement, my morning coffee momentarily forgotten. As it rumbled past, I could see the words “Melbourne, Victoria, Australia” emblazoned on the side. But I was half a world away, at an outdoor cafe in San Francisco.

I wasn’t the only one excited. “Look Daddy, it’s a fashion train!” cried the little boy on the next table I smiled – the term “fashion train” seemed apt. The other tram lines in San Francisco come in standard-issue silver and red. This line – the F – features historic street cars from around the world in various shapes and colours. Each has its own look stylishly reflecting the fashions of different eras and places.

Take the one painted in the striking combination of cobalt blue and canary yellow – the livery of the 1940s trams of San Francisco. Or the Washington DC tram from the same era, with its interlocking curved stripes of white, pale blue, teal and red. My favorite is one painted in the post-war San Diego design – pea green with cream and brown trimmings and the instruction to “RIDE & RELAX” in black lettering on the side of the car.

The F-line trams are not to be confused with the famous antique cable cars mentioned in every guide to the city. The popularity of the cable cars is easy to understand – both the machines themselves and the hills they climb are distinctively San Francisco and picturesque. But the cable cars are also crowded and tickets cost $5, so they are more heavily favoured with tourists than locals.

The F-line trams are less famous than the cable cars, but that makes riding them more pleasant. They can be crowded down towards the waterfront, but up at the Castro end of the service you really can ride and relax. The varnished wooden seats, lampshades with incandescent light bulbs and satisfying screech and clatter add to the old-time atmosphere. On a foggy day, it feels like you’ve been transported back in time.

Yet this is no tourist trap – the F-line tram is a regular commuter service and unlike the cable cars, you don’t need a special ticket. Your $2 ticket transfer from any other part of the city’s transport system is valid if you want to ride, while trainspotting is of course free – if you don’t count the cost of brunch.

I always imagined a trainspotter as an English eccentric in an anorak, lurking about railways junctions and scribbling down train numbers in notebooks. I found this a rather inexplicable pastime until I discovered the childlike joy of spotting the different F trains as they glide about San Francisco. Now the simple act of catching public transport in this city has become a treasure hunt. There’s Milan! New Orleans! Melbourne! Los Angeles! With antique street cars from dozens of cities around the world, it’s a transport museum on the streets.

After my encounter with the displaced Melbourne tram, I went to the San Francisco Railway Museum to find out more. The museum, occupying a single room on Steuart St at the Embarcadero, is not much bigger than a street car itself but it is crammed with artefacts for train lovers such as vintage fare boxes and traffic signals, black and heavy like a Victorian pillar box. The museum is free but if you spend money in the gift shop, which sells tram magnets and historic photographs, it helps fund restoration of the historic trams. My main purpose was to find out about the F fleet and how a Melbourne tram came to be roaming the streets of San Francisco.

It seems San Francisco is the Florida of the tram world – it’s where old street cars go to retire. Just as San Francisco attracts people from all over the United States and the world, so too it has street cars from near and far. The Italian city of Milan is in the lead, contributing 10 cars in the fleet and rivalling San Francisco itself. The Milanese trams are symmetrical and characterised by three wooden framed doors at the front, middle and back of the tram. There are two in yellow from the 1920s, two in green from the 1930s to 1970s, and six in the orange livery used since the 1970s. The operating fleet also includes a pre-World War 2 tram from Kobe and Hiroshima in Japan – green with a white roof and shaped like a bus. Meanwhile, a blue-and-white Swiss tram from the 1950s bears a coat of arms and the words “Zürich sister city of San Francisco” – one of 16 sister cities, apparently. I’ve even spotted a peculiar roofless tram from the seaside resort of Blackpool, England, which struck me as somewhat optimistic given the typical English weather.

There are now two trams from Melbourne on the streets of San Francisco. The one that first attracted my attention was the 1928 W2-class tram. The long wooden carriage has closed sections at each end and two doorways in the middle and is painted in green with a pale gold roof. It is unaltered from its 1920s design aside from a fresh coat of paint and the anachronisms of wheelchair access and a GPS navigation system. This model was phased out in its hometown in the late 1970s but still runs as an historic relic on the City Centre loop line in central Melbourne. San Francisco bought two in 1984 and has kept the other in storage as a spare. Last year San Francisco added another Melbourne tram to its fleet – a shorter 1946 SW6 model donated by the Victorian government.

There are also dozens of “PCC” trams – an American model designed by the Presidents’ Conference Committee in 1934 to try to lure passengers back to streetcars. They are a standard shape but painted in the colours of the cities that once operated them: Baltimore; Birmingham, Alabama; Boston; Brooklyn; Cincinatti; Dallas; Detroit; Kansas City; Los Angeles; Minneapolis; New Jersey; New Orleans; San Diego; Washington DC. I imagine brightly painted street cars jiggling past the famous landmarks of America and wonder how different the US would be if all these cities still had functioning public rail systems, rather than freeways and suburbs. In 1937, when the Los Angeles Railway launched its fleet of PCC trams, painted in two-tone orange and yellow, it was such a big deal that Shirley Temple unveiled them at the opening ceremony. But by 1963 car culture had rendered them defunct in their native city, and they were packed off to Cairo, Egypt.

In another sign of social change, I note there was once an international route between El Paso, Texas and Juarez, Mexico. The PCC model, introduced in 1950, is painted in red and gray and the original Texan-Mexican version had internal seating reconfigured to run sideways to assist customs checks. The cross-border service ran from 1882, back when trams were still pulled by horses, until 1974 but the museum staff didn’t know why it stopped. My hunch was it was because of concerns over border security on the US side but when I contacted the El Paso Historical Society, I discovered otherwise. It ended because Juarez businessmen persuaded their local government that too many Mexicans were crossing the border to shop. Politicians in El Paso and Juarez are now trying to reinstate a public service link – probably rail – that would connect the two cities, though skepticism is high about whether border issues will allow this to become reality.

The F line is the only street car line in San Francisco to run entirely above ground. It starts at the gaudy tourist center of Fisherman’s Wharf with its vintage penny arcades and waxwork museums. The trams run along the Embarcadero, skirting the edge of the bay. They loop around the block at the Ferry Building – home to gourmet speciality shops, restaurants and a thrice-weekly farmers’ market and probably more famous now for its food than the ferries. The F then heads straight up Market Street, past the downtown area and into the Castro, where San Francisco’s gay scene is most concentrated. The end of the line is ends a block from the splendid Castro Theatre, an historic movie house dating from 1922, the same era as many of the trams.

My brunch spot was over a mile away from the designated F route. I was at Toast, a cafe with outdoor seating on Church St in the quiet family neighbourhood of Noe Valley. This is J-line territory so the vintage cars don’t usually come this way. But a driver explained to me, many trams use Church St when entering or exiting service for the day because of the location of the depot, or “the barn”.

As the Melbourne tram disappeared down the hill, I turned back to my breakfast. But there was no return to business at the neighbouring table where the boy was equally distracted by the standard J-line trams. The man caught my eye and we both laughed. “Fashion train is a pretty clever name,” I told him. “Oh that’s just because he can’t say ‘old-fashioned’,” he answered.

Maybe so, but they’ll always be fashion trains to me.

A version of this article first appeared in the Los Angeles Times in May 2010, under the headline San Francisco: The transit museum known as the F line. Shorter versions appeared in The Australian in June 2010 (Last Stop San Francisco) and the Dallas Morning News (Retired streetcars from worldwide get new duty on San Francisco’s colorful F Line) in October 2010. Copyright to the words and pictures is owned by me, with all rights reserved. No reproduction without prior written permission.

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