Through the slot between the tracks, you can hear the metallic clinking of a steel
cable as it softly grinds against various sheaves and guide rollers.
Rising in the distance a streetcar appears to defy gravity as it gracefully crests the hill,
pulled along the track by its forceful grip on the wire rope beneath the street surface.
These are the Cable Cars of San Francisco, they are part of a system that was first invented here
in the city, and are now the last remaining cable streetcar system in the entire world.
Cable Cars are not to be confused with funicular railways. A true Cable Car
operates along busy streets, and are pulled by endless loops of cable that never stop moving,
and the cars themselves can detach at will. Funicular railways like the Great Orme Tramway
in Wales may look like a cable car, but they are still considered a Funicular railway
because they are permanently fixed to the cable and rely on the cable itself to start and stop.
The story of the San Francisco Cable Cars is full of tribulation and triumph, and they wouldn’t be
here today if it weren’t for the efforts of an outspoken woman named Friedel Klussmann,
but...her story comes later. First, let us ride the streetcar back in time, to the Victorian era,
an age in the city’s past when so many new innovations were brought to light.
Andrew Smith Hallidie came to San Francisco with his father in 1852 after a long voyage
from England. They were both inventors, and Andrew’s father had a patent for wire rope.
They came to the bay area hoping, like so many other men during the gold rush,
to find gold and make themselves wealthy. After no luck, Andrew’s father returned to
England the next year, while he himself stayed behind working in gold mines.
Occasionally he was hired as a surveyor and bridge builder. In 1857 he abandoned mining and returned
to San Francisco to start a new company and manufacture wire rope. His rope was sold to
various mining companies around the bay area who used his patented Hallidie rope tramway.
It was an invention that used an endless loop of cable that transported carts of ore
great distances. Hallidie’s wire rope inventions had revolutionized the efficiency of mining
operations around the world. But there was yet another issue that continued to tug at him.
The city of San Francisco had impossibly steep hills. When the city was first established,
the main area of town mostly developed on the flatter areas near the bay, but as the city
continued to grow, they had to expand westward, up the hills. Hallidie watched as horses struggled to
pull carriages and wagons up the city streets. And bore witness to a tragic event where a coachman
mercilessly beat his horse as it tried to haul a carriage up the wet cobblestone road. The horse
gave out, sending the carriage of passengers and the horse itself tumbling to their doom.
Andrew Hallidie felt that he could use his tramway invention to build a streetcar
system that could safely take passengers up and down the hills. And so he established the Clay
Street Hill Railroad and hired Engineer William Eppelsheimer to help design it.
The idea was to install a constantly moving cable ropeway underneath the city street,
and have special carriages that could grip the cable, allowing it to traverse the hills.
On August 2nd, 1873...Andrew Hallidie publicly tested his Clay Street Cable Car amid a crowd
of spectators, and successfully ran the coach up and down the hill. A month later, his Clay Street
Railroad would open to the public and become one of his most lucrative business ventures.
Four years later, in 1877 the Sutter Street Railroad opened a competing Cable Car service.
They managed to avoid infringing on Hallidie’s patented designs
by altering some of the mechanisms. Again, the new Cable Car system proved profitable,
prompting more companies to open slightly different railways of their own.
San Francisco’s Cable Car system reached its peak in 1892 when 12 different cable car lines operated
under 7 separate companies. Over 53 miles of Cable Car tracks had crisscrossed the city,
which was somewhat of an Urban Planning headache. However, with competition comes innovation. As the
companies competed with each other, they managed to perfect the cable car technology, making safer,
quieter, and smoother rides for their passengers. The current system still operating today is
composed of several designs and technologies perfected just prior to the turn of the 20th
century from cable car systems around the world. It starts with a single powerhouse
located on the corner of Mason and Washington streets. Inside are the massive rotating motors
that turn the four endless loops of cables that move the various cable cars down the streets.
These wheels are called sheaves, they are designed to keep the cable taut
and use friction to pull them. In the past, the sheaves would have been powered by steam engines
but were converted to electricity long ago. The cable cars are able to grab the rope using
these grip levers which extend beneath the slot in the tracks and can grip the cable with a variable
force, sometimes thousands of pounds per square inch. When the grip operator wants to get the car
rolling, they can gradually increase pressure on the grip until they are satisfied with the speed,
and then proceed to tighten the grip so that the car cannot slip from the cable.
The cable will always pull the car along at a steady speed of 9 ½ miles per hour,
or a little over 15 kilometers per hour. The cars usually only stop to pick up passengers
in the middle of a street intersection because this is where the ground elevation is level.
To come to a stop, the gripman will release the grasp on the cable and start applying brakes using
a foot pedal on the floor of the car. This presses brake pads made of wood against the rails to apply
friction to slow or stop a car. But if the gripman needs extra stopping power, he can easily apply
the secondary brakes which pushes pads against the wheels themselves. To prevent the instance of
a runaway car, there is also an emergency brake. Only used as a last resort. The gripman can pull
a lever that forces a steel wedge into the slot between the tracks. It is said that the force of
this steel wedge is so great, that cutting torches would be required to free it from the slot.
There are areas of the city where one set of cable car tracks intersects another, this became an
issue back in the old days because one company’s cable would be allowed on top, but the other
company’s cable would have to pass below. It was decided that whichever cable car line came after,
would have to force the cable to dip below the older line. When this happens, a cable car from
the newer line must drop the rope from the grip and use its momentum to coast over the crossing.
When it gets to the other side, the tracks will dip low enough to allow the gripman to take the
rope and continue along. If the gripman fails to let go of the rope before reaching the crossing,
the cable will be forced out of the grip which can damage both the grip and the rope itself.
Another interesting innovation is the depression rollers. Since the cable must always be kept
beneath the tracks and pulled taut, a set of depression rollers sit at the foot of each incline
and push down on the cable to prevent it from rising up through the slot.
When the grip of the car approaches, it will slam against the push bars over each roller,
sliding them out of the way, and as the grip passes, the rollers will snap back into place.
When the cable cars reach the end of the line, they usually let go of the rope and roll onto a
turntable. The gripman and the conductor will then turn the car around and push it onto the opposite
tracks. The only line that doesn’t require turntables is the California Street line,
where the cars have grip mechanisms on both ends of the vehicle. When the cars get to the end,
they simply drop the cable and coast over a switch track. The gripman and the conductor
then reverse their positions and the car can begin rolling in the opposite direction.
For a few decades after their invention by Andrew Hallidie, Cable car lines opened
up in cities across the world such as Dunedin New Zealand, Melbourne Australia, and Glasgow
Scotland. Today San Francisco is the only city to continue to operate a true cable car system. This
might make you wonder what could have happened to the cable car, that made it nearly extinct?
Well, the Great Earthquake of 1906 dealt the first blow. Many cable car lines were heavily damaged.
And the fire that spread throughout the city had leveled many of the various powerhouses that ran
the cable cars. The expense of reconstruction was often too much for many of these companies
to invest in, so they gave up and sold what assets they had left. The handful of cable car lines that
remained were rebuilt because even in 1906, the cable car lines were the most efficient
way of getting up the steepest hills. But all that would gradually change in the coming years
as motorcars became cheaper and easier to own. As America’s car culture expanded, the need for
the cable cars began to dwindle. In the year 1912, the same year the Titanic sank beneath
the dark waters of the Atlantic, the City of San Francisco established a municipal railway.
It had bought out the Market Street Cable Car line and repurposed it into an electric streetcar line
that was operated by the city. It became the first municipal railway in the United States,
and was criticized by many as “an experiment in Socialism”. But nevertheless, the electric
streetcars were popular because they were much faster and more comfortable than cable cars.
However, they could never be used on the steep hills and were restricted to the flatter ground.
That was, until the year 1917 when the Municipal Railway bought its first motorcoach,
a powerful vehicle that could haul passengers up any of the city’s streets at twice the speed of
a cable car. Indeed the Muni Motorcoach became so popular that by the next year Muni had 5 of them
with more on the way. And as technology advanced, larger motorcoaches made way for city busses. And
as the last remaining cable car lines would close down, Muni would swoop in and buy them up. In
certain instances, Muni would continue to operate the cable cars, but more often than not,
the assets would be sold off and the cable car tracks would be ripped out of the streets.
In 1947 Mayor Roger Lapham saw that running busses was far cheaper than running cable cars,
which lead him to state "the city should get rid of all cable car lines as soon as possible."
Lapham was elected as San Francisco Mayor because of his ambitions for progress.
He was not very sentimental and saw the cable cars as a hindrance against his ideals of efficiency
and progress and he had a lot of public and private support. But there was one person
from which he did not have support. Mrs. Friedel Klussmann was a proud
citizen of San Francisco and she was outraged at the thought that city leaders were so quick to
remove the city’s iconic cable cars, she founded an organization called San Francisco Beautiful
and started a citizen’s committee -made up mostly of women- dedicated to saving the
cable cars. The committee ran a campaign that showed everyone the value of the cable cars.
The Committee also sent in dozens of letters of protest to city leaders
and they had many different petitions signed by thousands of San Franciscans.
Mayor Lapham met with Mrs. Klussmann and gave her quite a lecture, "The horsecar had to go,
the cable cars have to go. Waving petitions in the face of progress can no more stop it, than could
King Canute stop the waves by royal decree!" Despite his condescending tone, Mrs. Klussmann
was not discouraged and continued her opposition. In response, Mayor Lapham ran a campaign against
the cable cars, even partaking in a publicity stunt where he had an old horse-drawn streetcar
pulled through downtown to poke fun at how antiquated the streetcar system was.
Though Mrs. Klussmann’s campaign to save the cable cars had better results. Citizens understood the
cable cars were a major tourism draw to the city, and a piece of engineering history still around
for people to admire. Friedel Klussmann and her committee gathered the 40,000 signatures needed
to put Measure 10 on the November 1947 ballot, a measure that could preserve the cable cars.
The local newspapers were starting to understand the shift of sides on the argument,
they could see that more and more people were in favor of the old streetcars,
and so they began printing stories and articles that supported the efforts for preservation.
Across the United States, celebrities like Irene Dunne declared their support.
Salvador Dali and even Eleanor Roosevelt praised the San Francisco icons.
Letters of support poured in from countries across the globe including Denmark, Norway, India,
England, Guam, Brazil, Mexico, and Canada. A man from postwar Germany, wrote in a letter,
"Let the would-be abolishers of your cable cars come over to Europe to find out how many good old
things have gone, utterly gone. ... I think, men should not deliberately lay hands on such things."
The entire city of San Francisco was behind Friedel Klussmann and then it was time to
vote on Measure 10, whether to junk or keep the cable cars. Mrs. Klussmann waited anxiously as
the votes were counted, and soon the answer came, the measure had passed by a landslide,
166,000 votes in favor vs 50,000 votes against. The Cable Cars were saved, at least for now.
Throughout the 50’s and 60’s Mrs. Klussmann and her committee had to continue fighting off several
political and private attempts to destroy the cable cars. But she never backed down.
In 1964, the San Francisco cable cars became the first moving National Historic Landmark. The new
landmark status added further protection towards keeping the cable car system from destruction.
In the 1980’s Mayor Dianne Fienstein had led a rebuilding effort to reconstruct what was left
of the Cable Car system and ensure it had proper funding. Mrs. Klussmann celebrated the good news,
She was an elderly woman by this point in time, but all her efforts to save the
cable cars were finally blossoming. Friedel Klussmann died in 1986,
leaving behind a legacy of preservation for the city’s most historic icons. As a show of
mourning for her passing, the cable cars were shrouded in black. And 11 years later, in 1997,
the turntable at Hyde and Beach Streets was dedicated to her, the woman who fought tirelessly
to save the San Francisco Cable Cars so we, the future generations, can see and appreciate them.
As you can imagine, it is not easy to keep the cable cars running, it requires various skills
that just aren’t as commonplace anymore. As for driving the cable cars through the streets,
that requires prior experience operating Muni transit vehicles, those that qualify
can then take a 3-week training course, of which very few people make it past the first day.
In 1892 when the cable car systems were at their peak, there were over 600 of them rolling through
the city, but now there are only 45 left in service. Today the cable cars are mostly used by
tourists, they are somewhat of a novelty, after all, the fare to get on them is rather pricey.
The COVID-19 pandemic of 2020 had forced the cable cars to close for over a year,
but in early July of 2021, they began testing for a summer reopening.
The entire system has become iconic for the city, and adds to its charm, and helps draw in tourists.
For some, it is hard to look at the cable cars and see a heart and soul, but if you can peruse the
stories of its past, in those pages of history you will find their beating heart and their
glowing soul. From Andrew Smith Hallidie’s desire to create a safe way for people to climb the hills
of the city he loved, to Friedel Klussmann’s desire to save history and preserve beauty...the
streetcars are infused with the hopes, delights, and memories of the very city they serve.