[PRCo] The Bay Area

[Fred Schneider]

Peter included two San Francisco films in one of his European heritage sections.   I isolated it and added a bunch of other San Francisco material.
In major cities with heavy traffic the cables were cheaper than horses.   But as soon as electric cars were available, the economics shifted in their favor.   Most of the energy of a cable car line went into moving that wire rope under the street; very little went into moving the cars.   The cable cars were about twice as expensive to run and had twice as many accidents as the electric cars.   Not surprising that outside of San Francisco, Seattle and Tacoma, they disappeared almost as soon as the streetcars were perfected.   

Most of you have already seen the 1905 film where the camera was put in the front of the cable car.   In one of the unrestored versions, someone took the time to explain that (1) automobiles were very rare and (2) they might have been stuck into the picture to make the city look more cosmopolitan in 1905 because counted the same car going around the cable car ten times.   

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pnDjmNNC9So&feature=related

And here is a more version of the surviving cable lines:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sZiYI8H-D9U
Twin Peaks Streetcar / Trolley Tunnel Construction and Opening - 1918.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mSnqmLqg6yg

"The Roar of the Four," --- Four tracks on Market Street in 1941 with Muni cars on the outside and Market Street Railway on the inside.   MSRy and Pittsburgh Railways were related companies.    Three years later the city would buy Market Street and convert most of its lines to bus.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wzqs6DF_wGE&feature=related

And the new Muni Breda cars

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WSsy9ZfiGkM&feature=related

Fantastic Wartime Video of Key System in Oakland, California.   What was the most modern car in the fleet?   Why those 900 series city cars.  They had GE PCM control like Baltimore and Brooklyn Peter Witts.   Why was it so easy for Key System to maintain those old New York elevated cars for the Richmond Ship Yard Railway during the war?   They had years of experience with GE type M control and C-6 master controllers.   Those neat streamlined bridge trains that were built in the late 1930s by Bethlehem Steel were just new bodies sitting on old guts salvaged from old cars that used to run to the ferries.   Those new streamlined "Bridge Cars" were identical electrically to those New York elevated cars that came west for the Richmond Shipyard line during the war!   

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=77pPoLTacek&NR=1

And you blamed GM and NCL for getting rid of Key System?   It was an obsolete property with cars that ran at walking speed.   The people were moving out behind the hills into the suburbs.   Those new areas finally got rail service with BART in the 1980s and 1990s.  

This next one shows BART from the motorman's cab.   The impression I want you to come away with is that BART is a commuter railroad with a downtown distributor subway in San Francisco.   Conceptually it would be similar to taking the Long Island or the New York Central or the Pennsy or the Lackawanna and running their trains from Port Washington or White Plains or New Brunswick or Morristown under Broadway in Manhattan.  You see two sets of numbers in the cab ... red 70 and a green 67 or 68.   The red number is the speed code.   The green number is the actual performance.  Trains were normally limited to 70 unless they were behind schedule and then the central computer would change the code to 80.    I recall Harre Demoro telling me that he would have letters from readers dumped on him at the Oakland Tribune during the "double nickles speed limit era" that they would have to drive at 55 on California route 24 but those damn BART trains would sail right past them at 70 or 80.   Being the transit writer, Harre would have to find a delicate way to explain to the public that moving people was perhaps more important than moving cars.   

Remember that BART's consultants recommended 5'-6" gauge claiming that 4-8-1/2 wasn't stable enough for high speed running.   Sad that everything has to be built special for them and that the French can build standard gauge trains that are so smooth at almost 200 miles per hour that you would think you were sitting in your own living room.   Their record is 357.2 mph.   Their record for the longest non-stop run was 190 mph from Calais to Marseilles but we just don't understand!   

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EpJkQEhHJ9o&feature=related

Embarcadero is the first of many downtown stations under Market Street:   

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4anh4zEJHt0&NR=1

This shows one of the newer cars leading a train at MacArthur station, Oakland and one of the original shovel nose cars at
Lake Merritt station in Oakland.   I remember Harre Demoro telling me that they needed those sloped front cars to be dramatic ... to get Californians out of their cars.   Eventually the agency discovered they needed flat cars because they spent too much money putting cars on a turntable and juggling A-cars to the front of a train.   The also originally had carpets in every car ... looks in one of the pictures like they went to resilient hard flooring since the 1970s.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ju0CE4GgwMo