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MUNI Heritage Weekend

Before heading to Philadelphia last weekend I took time to spend Saturday with my friend Mark at MUNI Heritage Weekend. As an active transit advocate in San Francisco, Mark is a fun person to attend such an event with. I like to think I know a fair amount about things on rails in San Francisco, but he’s much more knowledgeable about transit in general.

I was pretty excited about this day, I was all decked out in my cable car earrings and Seashore Trolley Museum t-shirt.

The day began with a walk down Market to meet Mark near the railway museum, which was the center of all the activity for the day. I arrived a bit early and spent my time snapping pictures of all the interesting streetcars and buses coming around. When we met up our first adventure was to take a ride on our first vintage bus of the day, the 5300!

Now, as far as vintage goes, the 5300 doesn’t go very far back in history. This bus was an electric from 1975 and it had a good run, still riding around the city just over a decade ago. This was a long ride, taking us down Howard, South Van Ness, all the way down to Mission and 25th street, then back to the railway museum. It took about 45 minutes, during which time Mark and I had lots of time to catch up.

We then had some time to walk around a bit and see what else was out. Throughout the day we saw one of the Blackpool “boat” streetcars, the Melbourne streetcar (which I still haven’t ridden in!) the Number 1 streetcar and more.

Next up was a ride on the short 042 from 1938! This was a fun one, it’s the oldest bus in the fleet and the blog post about the event had this to say:

A surprise participant was Muni’s oldest bus, the 042, built in 1938 by the White Motor Company. Its engine had given up the ghost, but the top-notch mechanics at Woods Motor Coach Division swapped it out for one in a White bus Market Street Railway’s Paul Wells located in the Santa Cruz Mountains and repatriated. The 042 operated like a dream looping around Union Square all weekend, as did 1970 GMC “fishbowl” 3287, shown behind it

Pretty cool! As the quote suggests, it was not electric so it was able to do its own thing in the Union Square loop, in a ride that only took about 20 minutes.

Then, more viewing of random cars. I think the highlight of my time then was getting to see the 578 “dinky” close up. Built in 1896, this street car looks quite a bit like a cable car, making it a distinctive sight among all the other street cars.

By then we were well into the late afternoon and decided to grab some late lunch. Continuing our transit-related day, I took him up Howard street to get a view of the progress on the new Transbay Transit Center. After walking past it on street level, we went up to the roof deck where we live to get some views and pictures from up above.

This was definitely a bus-heavy heritage day for me, but it was fun. Lots more photos from the day here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/pleia2/albums/72157674240825576

That evening it was time for me to get off the buses and rails to take another form of transportation, I was off to Philadelphia on a plane!