S.F. Builds Cable Cars the Old-Fashioned Way

They just don’t make cable cars like they used to--except, of course, in San Francisco.

Working from dogeared blueprints and plans kept only in their heads, four carpenters spent 3,000 hours making a brand-new cable car that’s set to hit the rails Monday.

The new, green and white No. 9 car was crafted by hand, from its bronze-alloy bell to its Alaskan cedar roof. It will carry its first passengers exactly 100 years after the death of the father of cable cars, Andrew Hallidie.

The car’s life expectancy is also 100 years, because the San Francisco cable cars are solid, made almost entirely of oak, and are painstakingly maintained.

“I think the No. 1 reason they last longer than streetcars is that they’re handmade,” said 45-year-old Bob Harris, a carpenter who has crafted cable cars for 22 years. “There’s special care in everything. Plus, they have no motor parts to wear out.”

San Francisco’s first cable cars started wearing out in the 1980s, and the Municipal Railway workshop has been crafting new ones just about every other year.

According to the San Francisco Cable Car Museum, Hallidie hatched the idea of making streetcars that grab constantly moving underground cables for power after seeing a horse-drawn streetcar accident in 1869 in which five horses were killed.

In the following years, cable car systems bloomed in cities all over the world, only to be eclipsed in the 1940s by electrical streetcars, subways and buses. While San Francisco’s routes shrank to just two--crisscrossing the hilly city on the California and Powell lines--the cable car and its clanging bell has become a city landmark.

Each seven-ton car costs about $275,000. Constant maintenance is needed to replace the wooden brake shoes and grips that grab the underground cable, which moves at a constant speed of 9 mph. Both the shoes and grips are crafted at the Municipal Railway workshop and must be replaced every three days.