The California Street Cable Railroad (Cal Cable) was a long-serving cable car operator in

San Francisco San Francisco, officially the City and County of San Francisco, is a commercial, Financial District, San Francisco, financial, and Culture of San Francisco, cultural center of Northern California. With a population of 827,526 residents as of ...

, founded by

Leland Stanford Amasa Leland Stanford (March 9, 1824June 21, 1893) was an American attorney, industrialist, philanthropist, and Republican Party (United States), Republican Party politician from Watervliet, New York. He served as the eighth governor of Calif ...

. The company's first line opened on California Street in 1878 and is the oldest cable car line still in operation. The company remained independent until 1951, outlasting all the other commercial

streetcar A tram (also known as a streetcar or trolley in Canada and the United States) is an urban rail transit in which vehicles, whether individual railcars or multiple-unit trains, run on tramway tracks on urban public streets; some include s ...

and cable car operators in the city. The city purchased and reopened the lines in 1952; the current cable car system is a hybrid made up of the California Street line, and the Hyde Street section of Cal Cable's O'Farrell, Jones & Hyde line, together with other lines already in municipal ownership. Some surplus cable cars were sold to

Knott's Berry Farm Knott's Berry Farm is a amusement park in Buena Park, California, United States, owned and operated by Six Flags. In March 2015, it was ranked as the List of amusement park rankings#North America, twelfth-most-visited theme park in North Ameri ...

which operated them at its Southern California amusement park from 1955 to 1978. At the end of this period, some were sold back and one (#43) is preserved at the

Southern California Railway Museum The Southern California Railway Museum (SCRM, reporting mark OERX), formerly known as the Orange Empire Railway Museum, is a railroad museum in Perris, California, United States. It was founded in 1956 at Griffith Park in Los Angeles before movin ...

California type streetcar

California's mild climate encouraged an innovative

design first used on the California Street Cable Railroad in 1891. The cars feature an enclosed center section with open seating on each end of the car. These California type streetcars were subsequently adopted by many California electric railways, including

Pacific Electric The Pacific Electric Railway Company, nicknamed the Red Cars, was a privately owned Public transport, mass transit system in Southern California consisting of electrically powered streetcars, interurban cars, and buses and was the largest electr ...

Los Angeles Railway The Los Angeles Railway (also known as Yellow Cars, LARy and later Los Angeles Transit Lines) was a system of streetcars that operated in Central Los Angeles and surrounding neighborhoods between 1895 and 1963. The system provided frequent loc ...

and San Francisco, Napa and Calistoga Railway.

References

External links

Finding Aid to the California Street Cable Railroad Company records, 1884-1952

The Bancroft Library The Bancroft Library is the primary special-collections library of the University of California, Berkeley. It was acquired from its founder, Hubert Howe Bancroft, in 1905, with the proviso that it retain the name Bancroft Library in perpetuity. ...

a scripophily based article re. the San Francisco Cal Cable and the Swiss Borel Bankers (in German)
Cable car railways in the United States Public transportation in San Francisco Defunct California railroads 1878 establishments in California {{California-transport-stub

California type streetcar

See also

References

External links