page_title: San Francisco Historic Trolley Festival
section_title: First season
hierarchical_section_title: San Francisco Historic Trolley Festival / First season
caption_attribution_description: "St. Louis" PCC streetcar 1704 – actually SF Muni car 1128, repainted and renumbered to its original identity from when it operated on the St. Louis streetcar system – laying over in the wye on 11th Street south of Market Street during the first San Francisco Historic Trolley Festival, in 1983. Its rollsign is displaying St. Louis signage (for route 70-Grand to Ball Park). The car's participation in the 1983 festival was sponsored by St. Louis-based Anheuser-Busch, and the "Pride of St. Louis" and "St Louis' Finest" signs on the car's end are Anheuser-Busch advertisements. This is the car's front end, and the car will back out onto Market Street, after which its operator will move to the front again and resume running forwards.
context_page_description: The San Francisco Historic Trolley Festival was a heritage streetcar service along Market Street in San Francisco, California, United States. It used a variety of vintage streetcars and operated five to seven days a week, primarily in summer months, between 1983 and 1987. Sponsored by the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce and operated by the San Francisco Municipal Railway, it was the predecessor of the F Market & Wharves heritage streetcar line that opened in 1995. It used historic streetcars from several different countries, as well as a number of preserved San Francisco cars. The impetus behind the Trolley Festival was that the city's famed cable car system, one of its biggest tourist attractions, was scheduled to be closed for more than a year and a half for renovation, starting in September 1982. The Trolley Festival was conceived as a temporary substitute tourist attraction during the cable car system's closure.
  When its operation began, in the summer of 1983, the Historic Trolley Festival was expected to be a temporary service, operating only five days a week–Thursday through Monday–and not expected to continue beyond that summer's tourist season.
context_section_description: The inaugural San Francisco Historic Trolley Festival was launched on Thursday, June 23, 1983, with a parade of vintage trolleys along Market Street.  Leading the procession was Muni's car 1, with Mayor Dianne Feinstein at the controls.  Other streetcars in the opening-day parade included Porto 122, Blackpool 226, San Francisco 178, and Melbourne 648. Non-passenger or non-vintage rail cars that joined them in the parade included Muni Repair Car 1008 (a PCC-type former passenger car), "Line Car" (overhead wire maintenance car) 0304, and Boeing LRV 1213.
  Public service began on June 24 and continued until September 19, operating five days a week, daily except Tuesdays and Wednesdays, on a scheduled headway of 15 minutes, requiring six cars. It ran from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. on weekends and 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. on the weekends with service. Muni's regular fares applied, which meant a 60-cent fare for most riders.
  The festival's route from the Transbay Terminal to 17th & Castro was about 3.5 miles (5.6 km) long each way.  Most cars displayed only destinations and route numbers from their cities of origin during the 1983 season, but officially the route was designated as F Market & Wharves from the start.  Although even the 1995-opened full-service F Market & Wharves line did not reach Fisherman's Wharf until 2000, a proposed future Market Street service had been given that designation in Muni's five-year plan of 1981–1986.  The previous F-line, which closed in 1951, had been F–Stockton and did not run on Market Street.  In the late 1970s, Muni planners had chosen "E" for the proposed Embarcadero vintage-streetcar line, and using "F" for a possible Market Street line seemed logical, and was a letter not in use. (M was in use for the M Ocean View line.)  The "F" designation for the festival route did not appear on Muni maps and schedules until 1985.
  Other trolleys that were scheduled to run in the festival were late arriving, or not yet ready for service by opening day.  These included Porto 189, which arrived in late June; Milwaukee 978 and Portland 503, which arrived in the first half of July; and Muni 130, whose restoration was not yet completed. To augment the Festival fleet until these cars were ready, LRV No. 1213, a modern vehicle only six years old, was temporarily added to the fleet.  The only "historic" aspect to car 1213 was that it had been one of the two prototype Boeing light rail cars built for San Francisco, in 1977, originally numbered 1221—the prototypes of a model that would ultimately comprise 130 cars in Muni's fleet. It and car 1220 (which later became 1212) were originally fitted with trolley poles for testing, but the test runs had never included Market Street, and the trolley poles were removed and replaced with pantographs before the cars entered regular service. For the Trolley Festival, trolley poles were reinstalled on car 1213, and it ran on the surface of Market Street for the first time.
  The 1934-built Blackpool car was a type that, in its home city, had gained the nickname "boat" tram, as its low-riding, open-top form was evocative of a boat as it "sailed" along the street.
  Porto 189 and Portland 503 entered service in July, and Muni 130 did so in early August. Milwaukee car 978 was sent on loan from the East Troy Railroad Museum, in Wisconsin, and was fully operable. Unfortunately, the car's underframe incurred serious damage during shipment to San Francisco.  It never entered service and was returned to Wisconsin in October 1983. The Portland car had originally run on narrow-gauge trucks, but these were replaced with standard-gauge trucks from a Melbourne streetcar in 1976 so that the car would eventually be able to operate at the Oregon Electric Railway Museum.
  Also joining the Festival fleet soon after the parade were PCC cars 1704, the 1946-built Muni 1128 repainted as St. Louis 1704, and Muni 1040, built in 1952 and the last PCC-type streetcar built in North America.  Because these cars were single-ended and unable to turn around on the crossover at 17th & Castro streets, when in service they ope
caption: Muni PCC streetcar 1128, repainted as St. Louis 1704, in the track "wye" on 11th Street just south of Market
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