F LineTrolley Car at Ferry Building bound for Castro
The theme for our travel pics this week is Public Transport
San Francisco CBD has three unusual forms of Public Transport – the cable-cars (which we’ll look at later), electric buses (using overhead power cables, like the old tram system) and streetcars like this one which was outside the ferry building.
Some of these streetcars aren’t the most comfortable mode of transport – this particular one is 75 years old, others are a decade or more older still – but they are still desirable. See what I did there? 🙂
The streetcars are from different cities around the US and around the world – and only run on a single line these days from Fisherman’s Wharf, along the Embarcadero, up Market Street and out to the Castro district.
There are trams from Melbourne, and Milan, from Baltimore and Birmingham, from Japan, and the UK, and Germany, and Moscow … and this one, number 1080.
It was originally built in 1946 in St Louis, for service in Minneapolis-St Paul, but was later sold to Newark, New Jersey – and then restored from storage about 10 years ago, and painted in the colou
rs of the LA ‘Pico line’ streetcar service.
If you ever find yourself in SF, make sure to take a ride on one – like the city’s buses, they are as cheap as chips (around $2.25, or a dollar for ‘seniors’ from memory…!)
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