Market Street Railway Car No. 1077
The Market Street Railway Car No. 1077 is a vintage PCC streetcar maintained by the Market Street Railway nonprofit and used in service on the San Francisco Municipal Railway's Embarcadero and Market & Wharves lines. Car No. 1077 is painted in "tribute livery", recreating the appearance of the streamlined PCC streetcars used by the Birmingham Electric Company from 1947 to 1953.
The design of the PCC streetcar was developed in 1936 by a "Presidents’' Conference Committee", made up of representatives of street railway operators and equipment manufacturers. The standardized design that resulted was notably quieter, safer, and more reliable than most contemporary streetcars. Those advantages, multiplied by the efficiencies of mass-production, led the PCC streetcars to be purchased for use across the country and around the world.
Though the Birmingham Electric Company participated in the Conference Committee, the utility deferred adopting the new design during the Great Depression, instead choosing to refurbish its older cars. By the end of World War II the company's fleet included 27 different types of passenger streetcars, some dating to 1901. In 1947 the company placed an order for 48 brand new PCC-type class A13 single-end double-truck electric streetcars without roof monitors from the Pullman-Standard Car Manufacturing Company. The large, new cars were used primarily on lines serving the steel mills and for express routes, while the more lightly-used routes were converted to rubber-wheeled "trackless trolleys" or motor buses, many of which were ordered at the same time.
After the Birmingham Transit Company acquired the transit system in 1951, the transition to rubber-wheeled cars and buses accelerated, with political support from the City of Birmingham. In 1952-1953 BTC sold its fleet of 48 6-year-old PCC streetcars to the Toronto Transit Commission. Toronto renumbered the cars as No. 4700-4747 and modified them with treadle-operated doors and fixed windscreens. They also removed the "White" and "Colored" seatback signs which had been required by Birmingham's segregation ordinances. The last of the Birmingham cars, No. 4704, was retired from service in 1983.
San Francisco's Car No. 1077 was constructed by the St Louis Car Company in 1947 and delivered to the Twin City Rapid Transit Co., where it was operated as their Car No. 360. In 1953 it was sold to Newark, New Jersey's Public Service Coordinated Transport and operated there as Car No. 21. It remained the property of that utility and its successors until New Jersey Transit sold it to the San Francisco Municipal Railway in 2004. Over the next seven years the car was fully restored by the Brookville Equipment Corporation of Brookville, Pennsylvania. It operates with four General Electric 1220 motors and seats 50 people.
External links
- Car No. 1077 at streetcar.org
- The Post-War Used PCC Cars at transit.toronto.on.ca