San Francisco, CA - F Market Line

Next up...San Francisco.

I actually lived in San Francisco and Oakland from 2009 to 2012 and these passed me by some 4000 times and I never gave them a thought. I always liked streetcars, but I guess my head was elsewhere. Instead, I was usually jumping the less aesthetically pleasant BART to City College of San Francisco from MacArthur Station in Oakland and back.

How very late 1960s. It does the trick but it ain't pretty.

Anyway, we had a trip planned for SF in October of 2013 and figured this was the time to do it. We parked in the Castro section of town and hoped to get on a true vintage San Francisco train, as the line runs trains modeled after many different cities, including Milan, Italy. Amazingly, the first train to pull up...a double ended San Francisco PCC (President's Conference Committee).

The glorious 1006 SF-painted. double-ended PCC picking us up.

There was some Italian festival toward the end of the line so we were cut short by a couple of stops. We got off to see what train was going to get us back to our cars. Up pulls a PCC with a Louisville, KY paint scheme. The funny story about this, is that Louisville never actually ran PCCs. They got cold feet after buying a handful of them and ended up going with buses. How boring.

It was a bumpier ride back but nonetheless we returned to the Castro and considered the trip a success.

The Louisville PCC freshly after kicking us to the curb.