CA: 'Super bus,' once intended to replace S.F.'s cable cars, back in service after 72 years

As a lifelong Muni-obsessive, Alex Key, 22, has ridden on every line and every vehicle, from the cable car to the boat car. But before this weekend he'd never had the chance to ride the gas-powered, twin engine, 1947 bus that was intended to replace the cable car on the Powell Street line.

That bus, last survivor of a fleet of 10, had not roared its engines on the streets of San Francisco for 72 years before it was finally running and ready to take its place as an attraction at Muni Heritage Weekend. Key, a City College of San Francisco student who is planning a career in public transportation, came from his home in Merced Heights to take its renaissance ride Saturday and was so moved by the historic experience that he came back to ride it again Sunday.

"It's beautifully restored, and getting to ride on it is amazing," said Key, who sat up front so he could watch the driver crank that big steering wheel, without the benefit of power steering. "And that smell of gasoline. You can feel the vibration under your feet."

Bus No. 0163, a 1947 Fegeol Twin Coach Model 44-D, has been part of the historic fleet since it was acquired by the nonprofit Market Street Railway 25 years ago, after serving its final active years as a bus used in movies in Southern California. Its beginning held great hope for San Francisco Mayor Roger Lapham, a pro business, pro future-transportation politician elected in 1943. Convinced that cable cars represented the past, he engineered the voter-approved merger of the Market Street Railway and the two Powell Street cable car lines, which was the beginning of the perceived end of the cable cars.

Lapham's plan was to replace them with buses strong enough to pull a load of 44 passengers up the Powell Street hill on the southern end and Hyde street on the north end. Sure that the city would go along, he instructed Muni to purchase 10 of these buses, at a cost of $15,186.81 each, and had them here and waiting for their moment.

"Cable cars on way out; city orders super buses," announced a bold Chronicle front page headline on Jan. 29, 1947. The new buses were ultramodern and streamlined, and Lapham was so sure that they would be a hit that he offered free rides in front of City Hall and stood at the door himself to help citizens aboard for their inaugural rides.

"All the other buses in the fleet looked like loaves of bread," said Rick Laubscher, president of the Market Street Railway. "The mayor wanted something super modern." Because the curved windshield had not been developed yet, the bus was fitted with a six-panel grille for maximum visibility. The foam seats are cushy, with a footrest for each passenger.

But all the comforts of the modern age could not overtake the uncomfortable wooden seats and clanky ride of the cable cars. Their takeover was torpedoed by the heroics of a group of women labeled "the cable car ladies" and led by Friedel Klussmann. She engineered a voter initiative that overturned Lapham's plan to kill the cable car service. Klussmann's name turned out to have more lasting power than Lapham's. Her saving of the cable car lines is a piece of civic history that city kids who love transit, including Key, have studied up on.

"They wanted to replace the cable cars. It did not work," is how he explained it. "The city complained massively."

The 10 new buses were assigned less glamorous duty on other lines in the city with steep streets. The "hillclimbers" the buses were called. But the twin-engine benefit turned out to be a detriment. The dual transmissions could not stay in sync and the buses were always in the shop. When diesel engines on buses came along in the 1950s, the gas-powered twin engines were as obsolete as they'd tried to make the cable cars. The Fageol Twin Coaches were all gone by 1953.

Decades ago, two of the coaches, Nos. 0163 and 0165, were located in the Orange Empire Railway Museum in Riverside County and acquired by the Market Street Railway for donation to Muni's historic fleet.

After long years in storage, waiting their turn with the mechanics, work finally started on them in 2018 at the Islais Creek maintenance yard. It took four years to get 0163 in running order, with 0165 sacrificed for parts. What they couldn't take from bus 0165 they had to make in the Muni machine shop. The labor was supplied by Muni mechanics, machinists, welders and painters, working around their other responsibilities. If there was an hour or two between assignments on the buses in the active fleet, they could put in an hour or two renovating the historic one.

"We squeeze it in here and there to make it work," said Anthony Gelardi, the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency's supervisor for the historic bus fleet. "That's why it took seven years to get it running."

It should have been five, but during a test run two years ago, a head gasket was blown. The problem of getting the twin engines to sync and shift gears simultaneously is still a problem, so No. 0163 will not be showing off its power on a hill. In 2022, running on a single working engine, the bus was driven slowly to the Powell Street cable car turnaround to celebrate the 75th anniversary of the campaign that saved the cable cars.

Then it went back to the shop for three more years of fine tuning before it could finally carry passengers during Muni Heritage Weekend. Several thousand people came to the San Francisco Railway Museum this weekend for a free ride on any of five vintage streetcars, with vintages ranging from 1896 to 1934, and seven historic buses from 1938 to 1990.

Only true transit aficionados, like Alex Key, were willing to wait for a ride on No. 0163 as it made a half-hour loop from the Muni museum to the Caltrain station and back.

"There is no question that the star of any Muni event is the boat tram," Laubscher said referring to the open-air streetcars, "but that bus is a very important part of San Francisco's history for what it was intended to do — replace the cable cars. We celebrate the fact that it didn't."

Its destination sign read "Hyde-O'Farrell," its originally intended route, when the doors opened for its first run at 10 a.m. Saturday to the train station. The bus was already at capacity with "rubber tire fans" when Gelardi took the driver's seat, which lacked a seat belt.

"When I heard those motors start and felt the rumble beneath me, it did not sound like any other bus I've ever ridden," Laubscher said. "The raw power of the thing is amazing."

During his ride, Mission District resident Nemo Baranyk-Cahoj, who is not yet 2, made his mom, Kristina, leave their seat mid-coach to come up to the front so he could watch the driver work that big wheel. Nemo liked the smell of the gas and the roar of those big engines, but most of all, he liked the sound of the bus horn, which Gelardi let him honk twice at an intersection. Even then, Nemo was not quite satisfied.

"He wants to drive it," his mom said.

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