Our group's leaders were the driving force in making vintage streetcars a full-time part of the San Francisco scene in the 1980s and 1990s.
#DOUBLE DECKER SF FREE#
We also operate the free San Francisco Railway Museum across from the Ferry Building at 77 Steuart Street, currently open Tuesdays through Saturdays, 12 Noon - 5 p.m. We advocate for historic streetcar and cable car service improvements and expansion, educate people about the importance of attractive transit in creating vibrant, livable cities, and celebrate the wonderful historic streetcars, cable cars, and buses owned and operated by Muni, a service of the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA). We rely instead on private donations and membership dues to help keep San Francisco's past present in the future. Our mission: Preserving Historic Transit in San Francisco. Market Street Railway is a non-profit organization with 1000 members, founded in 1976.
Please consider becoming a member or donating. We depend on the support of our members, donors, and volunteers to help us make San Francisco's historic transit great and to operate our San Francisco Railway Museum. Located near the Ferry Building at the south end of ferry plaza Tourists: don’t forget to come to the San Francisco Railway Museum to buy that sweatshirt that you DID forget at home! 🙂 For higher capacity, they chose articulated buses instead, or what the British, with their gift for great phrases, call “bendy-buses”.Īnd of course, double-deck buses are commonplace sights in San Francisco today, most of them open top tour buses. Muni did try out a double-decker bus at one point much later on, a demonstrator that didn’t catch on. London double-decker squeezing under the Southern Pacific railroad trestle in Colma.
(Maybe it was an escort vehicle, causing three steps behind the royalty of the double-decker.) There’s still a rail crossing at this point: BART, which took over the old SP right-of-way. During this period, Muni operated the developer-funded 76-Broadmoor line, connecting a new subdivision in Daly City to Muni lines in the city, but it never went this far south. The old tracks for the 40-line interurban streetcar to San Mateo are still in place, and well south of the San Francisco city limits, we see a Muni White Company motor coach trailing the double-decker. This is a particularly interesting photo. The photo below shows a tight squeeze going under the Southern Pacific Railroad trestle on El Camino Real in Colma. Presumably, that lower box could be changed to show whatever city they were currently visiting.īecause California’s overhead road clearances didn’t always anticipate vehicles this tall, they brought along telescoping poles that they could use to test the clearance before driving through.
And their roll signs read “GREETINGS FROM BRITAIN” in the square sign box, with “TO SAN FRANCISCO” in the rectangular box below.
#DOUBLE DECKER SF LICENSE#
The London buses have New York bus license plates, as well as their own UK registration.
The Whitcomb Hotel is on the left behind the bus, with the Fox Theater farther up the street on the right. The photo above shows one of the RTL-type buses (predecessor to London Transport’s famed Routemasters) on Market Street at Eighth, sharing the street with three “Iron Monster” Muni streetcars. Somehow, we missed this great story and photos, showing three double-deck London Transport buses coming to, and driving through, San Francisco on a cross-country British tourism promotion in 1952. The librarian for the San Francisco Chronicle, Bill Van Niekerken, comes up with some dandy articles by digging through the newspaper’s voluminous archives. London RTL-type double-deck bus on Market Street at Eighth, 1952
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