Jul. 12—Nothing lasts forever, but San Francisco's iconic cable cars and streetcars are putting that theory to the test.
Every day, the city's treasured historic artifacts shuttle thousands of tourists and riders up steep hills and down Market Street, just as they did when they debuted more than a century ago. Despite their ubiquitousness in parts of the city, they're not indestructible.
Much of the credit for preserving one of the nation's oldest forms of public transit belongs to an unheralded group of Muni's maintenance machinists. San Francisco is one of the last places in the world that still regularly operates 19th- and 20th-century streetcars and cable cars. So you can't just order new parts for a rail car that's 100 years old. When a cable car or streetcar breaks down, the transit operator's machinists are responsible for manufacturing, from scratch, the crucial components that can no longer be sourced anywhere else.
It's a challenge that can be akin to putting together a 1,000-piece jigsaw puzzle without an image of the completed puzzle to use as a reference. Original schematics have been lost to time.
And, unlike Muni's modern light-rail vehicles or even BART's now-retired 1970s-era legacy fleet, San Francisco's historic cars weren't built with consistent design standards.
"Every streetcar is different," said John Jaboneta, a maintenance machinist who's worked at Muni for more than a decade.
Repair jobs in Jaboneta's division range from replacing brake components that have been worn beyond usefulness to recreating significant chunks of a streetcar's infrastructure from scratch.
No project encapsulated the latter than Muni machinists' massive, years-long effort to rebuild one of San Francisco's oldest streetcars — Streetcar No. 162. The iconic green-and-cream trolley, manufactured in 1914, is among the six historic streetcars originally built for San Francisco.
In 2014, the year it was to celebrate its 100th birthday, Streetcar No. 162 collided head-on with a big rig truck on The Embarcadero. The wreck "basically wiped out the whole front of the car," said Paul Rullhausen, a Muni maintenance machinist supervisor. The city first tasked a San Diego-based vendor with the repairs, but ended up damaging the car's entire frame while returning the streetcar to the city in 2018.
Muni machinists who inspected No. 162 at the time determined the damage was so extensive it rendered a repair job hopeless.
So, Rullhausen said, they decided to rebuild the entire thing anew.
Working inside a sprawling facility hidden in plain sight next to BART's Balboa Park Station, the machinists rebuilt "basically all the lower running gear" for No. 162, including its frame.
"We had no drawings," said machinist Bob Brown, who Rullhausen described as "the conductor" of Muni's historic streetcar fleet. "We had to look at the wore out parts, try to figure out what size they used to be, make them and then make everything fit by measuring all the widths of the (frame's) holes that go in to make each piece fit that location."
In 2022, after months of calculations and manufacturing the necessary components, the machinists mounted the streetcar's newly built frame — a spitting image of the frame it debuted with more than a century ago — to its set of wheels. It was a snug fit.
Repairing another historic streetcar, No. 916, required Brown to custom make more than 600 individual parts, including new axles, bolt gears, motor bearings and hundreds of bushings.
Like Streetcar No. 162, Brown didn't have a drawing of the No. 916's original schematics, a challenge that he says makes the job "fun."
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"I like the thinking part, of how that's going to work, how to fix everything so when it goes out of here, it all works and it doesn't come back," Brown said.
Brittany McMartin, an apprentice machinist, hopes to someday develop the critical thinking skills of the division's most seasoned machinists.
A former preschool teacher, McMartin is about halfway through Muni's four-year machinist apprenticeship program. She was drawn to the trade by the thrill of building something new and the "amazing feeling" of a finished project.
McMartin is part of a new generation of machinists who will be tasked with preserving the veteran machinists' institutional knowledge. That can feel overwhelming at times, she said.
According to Rullhausen, the machinist supervisor, "we're all kind of getting up there in age," with the average machinist in his division being somewhere in the mid 50s. Several machinists will retire in the coming years. Replacing them will be difficult, he said, given the competitive labor market and fewer people pursuing the "dying trade."
"I feel pressured to learn as much as I can just because, in five years, we're going to lose a lot of people to retirement," McMartin said. "I'm trying to comprehend what they're trying to teach and really absorb it in order for us to be able to pass it down."
It's unclear when Streetcar No. 162 will re-enter service again. It sits inside the Curtis E. Green Light Rail Center, awaiting its final regulatory clearance from the California Public Utilities Commission.
On a recent weekday, machinists were already at work on the next big repair: one of Muni's popular boat streetcars, which was in desperate need of a new axle.
"A lot of the maintenance that we do on these cars, if it wasn't for us, I don't think they would be out on the street," Jaboneta said.
Reach Ricardo Cano: [email protected]; Twitter: @ByRicardoCano
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