Skip to main content

Track Work Through the Years

Track Work Through the Years
By Jeremy Menzies

San Francisco’s unique rail system brings together 150-year-old cable cars, historic electric streetcars of all shapes and sizes and modern light rail vehicles.  

Many trades across the SFMTA play a critical role in keeping the system moving. This month we look back in time at the work of one such group, the Track Department. While the lines and technologies of SF’s street railway have changed over the years, some of the base-level work, tools and skills needed to maintain our tracks are the same today as they were over 100 years ago. 

A decade before Muni was founded, the United Railroads Company (URR) dominated San Francisco’s transit system. URR owned and operated nearly 400 miles of street and cable car track all over the city. To keep this network in service, their track department was fully equipped to handle any possible construction or repair job. 

Black and white photo of group of people moving section of tracks with cranes

All hands were on deck for this job outside the Ferry Building in 1912. Here, two special work streetcars equipped with cranes lift an entire section of track in one piece. 

The Municipal Railway was built in 1912 and expanded over the next 16 years to include multiple lines and two dedicated tunnels. The city relied on its own team to maintain this system on a daily basis.  

Following World War II, many streetcar lines were converted to bus routes, but Muni retained the J, K, L, M, and N streetcar lines. With those core lines still in service, the work of the Track Dept. continued. 

Black and white photo of two people working on tracks. One holds a rail spike while the other strikes it with a large hammer

Taken on January 31, 1947, this photo shows Muni track workers Pat Kellerher and Con Maloney at Division and Bryant Streets.

In the 1970s, construction of the Market Street Subway transformed the city’s streetcar lines into the Muni Metro system. Miles of tracks were rebuilt to handle light rail vehicle (LRV) traffic, and an automatic train control system was introduced for subway operations.

Group of people working on tracks, one pushes a rail while the other lifts a tie into place

In this 1977 shot, a crew replaces K Line tracks on Ocean Avenue just outside Lick-Wilmerding High School.

Today the SFMTA Track Department is primarily responsible for maintaining and repairing our rail infrastructure. Outside of this, they take on other jobs moving cable cars to and from the cable car carpentry shop, hauling heavy equipment in the subway, and supporting the work of the teams that maintain and repair our stations. With the skilled labor, know-how, and equipment to do a variety of heavy jobs, the department plays a critical role in keeping Muni moving.

Photo of group of people lifting rail with a jack and pry bars

Whether it’s 1903 or 2023, track work is a team effort. This photo was taken during the March 2023 Fix-It Week when the Track team replaced sections of rail in the Van Ness Crossover.



Published April 27, 2023 at 04:23AM
https://ift.tt/1s9uWCl

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Women Pioneers at Muni: Adeline Svendsen and Muni’s First Newsletter

Women Pioneers at Muni: Adeline Svendsen and Muni’s First Newsletter By Jeremy Menzies To close out Women’s History Month, here’s a look back at one woman whose work to bring Muni staff together in the late 1940s created a legacy that lives on to this day. Adeline “Addy” Svendsen was founding editor of Muni’s first internal newsletter, “ Trolley Topics .” Adeline Svendsen sits at her desk in the Geneva Carhouse office building in this 1949 shot. Trolley Topics was a new venture when it started in February 1946. As Svendsen wrote in the first issue it was created, “to bring a little fun, a little news, and a lot of good will to all our fellow employees in the Railway.” Just two years prior in 1944, Muni merged with the Market Street Railway Company, expanding the small municipal operation into the largest transit provider in the city with hundreds of employees, vehicles of every shape and size, and dozens of facilities scattered across town. The newsletter was meant to help unite ...

Show HN: StreetComplete, an OpenStreetMap Editor for Humans https://ift.tt/2J8IL02

Show HN: StreetComplete, an OpenStreetMap Editor for Humans StreetComplete is an OpenStreetMap[0] editor directed at people who want to contribute and want to do this using their smartphone, without learning how to edit things[1]. It is available as an Android application. It is intended to be used as one walks, with quests appearing as markers on the map. Selecting a marker allows one to answer a simple question. The answer will be added to the OpenStreetMap database, with app handling selecting objects for editing, transforming answer into OSM tags and making edits. OpenStreetMap account is needed to apply edits, but it is possible to start without it, make some edits and login/register later. Note: I am not the main author, but I am one of the active contributors. Github page is at https://ift.tt/2g8lasH and https://ift.tt/3nR9PzS shows what was recently released. [0]OpenStreetMap is a Wikipedia of maps, available on the open licence. This dataset is already used for many interestin...

Show HN: Launch VM workloads securely and instantaneously, without VMs https://ift.tt/2QwJ1Kd

Show HN: Launch VM workloads securely and instantaneously, without VMs Hello HN! We've been working on a new hypervisor https://kwarantine.xyz that can run strongly isolated containers. This is still a WIP, but we wanted to give the community an idea about our approach, its benefits, and various use cases it unlocks. Today, VMs are used to host containers, and make up for the lack of strong security as well as kernel isolation in containers. This work adds this missing security piece in containers. We plan on launching a free private beta soon. Meanwhile, we'd deeply appreciate any feedback, and happy to answer any questions here or on our slack channel. Thanks! April 29, 2021 at 07:50AM