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The cable cars, of course, pull themselves along by grasping and releasing the underground cables. The cable system was invented for transit use in 1873. No sheave, no cable car.<\/p>\n
Article continues below this ad<\/p>\n
Sheedy and city crews disconnected the cable, pulled out the old wheel and replaced it with a new one. The big wheels hung in the sunlight for just a moment and then moved down into the darkness.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe work we are doing here is not like anything else in the world,\u201d said Rob Bergesen, the mechanical and shop superintendent for the cable cars. The technology is 150 years old, and most of the parts are unique. \u201cYou don\u2019t buy components like this, so we make them. You can\u2019t run down to\u00a0O\u2019Reilly\u2019s and get them.\u201d<\/p>\n
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<\/p>\n
Cable car motors are displayed at the cable car barn in San Francisco.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Carl Nolte\/S.F. Chronicle<\/p>\n
Bergesen is proud of his workforce. Sheedy provided the crane and the riggers, the city and Muni the labor. The job took all day. \u201cUnder budget, too,\u201d he said. The cost: about $750,000 in regional transit funds.<\/p>\n
But Powell and Market is just the tip of the proverbial iceberg. The rest of the work is mostly out of public sight. It\u2019s electric and mechanical.<\/p>\n
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The public can get a bit of a feel for the mechanics of the place at the Cable Car Museum at Washington and Mason streets in Chinatown, but I got a personal tour. I\u2019ve always been fascinated by the cable cars; I used to live on Russian Hill and rode them every day. Still do, when I get a chance.<\/p>\n
Inside the powerhouse is the belly of the beast, the smell of oil and grease, the hum of the electric motors, the big wheel sheaves that turn slowly, powering the steel cables, each six steel strands around a core, running about 9\u00bd mph. They run through the car barn like steel snakes, always moving through the winding machinery, into a tunnel and then under the street, invisible, kept in place by a system of pulleys and beams, up and down hills and around curves. There are four cables for three lines. The longest stretches 5 miles.<\/p>\n
In the old days, stationary steam engines supplied the power. Now it\u2019s run by four electric motors, each 500 horsepower.<\/p>\n
![\"San]()
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San Francisco native Steve Schroeder, a stationary engineer for the SFMTA, said, \u201cWhen they offered me this job, I felt so high you could have peeled me off the ceiling.\u201d<\/p>\n
Carl Nolte\/S.F. Chronicle<\/p>\n
The barn and powerhouse were built in 1888, badly damaged in the 1906 earthquake and rebuilt soon after. The place was in bad shape by the 1980s and was completely overhauled starting in 1984.\u00a0<\/p>\n
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\u201cA big job,\u201d said Steve Schroeder, a stationary engineer. \u201cNothing was left but three walls and a hole in the ground.\u201d<\/p>\n
The place was rebuilt, but that was 42 years ago, and now the electrical infrastructure that powers it all is beyond its useful life.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cIt hasn\u2019t been done since 1984,\u201d said Quon Chin, a San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency executive who is planning the project. \u201cIt\u2019s a big project. It\u2019s huge. It\u2019s absolutely needed.\u201d<\/p>\n
![\"Quon]()
<\/p>\n
Quon Chin, an executive with the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency, with the winding gear sheave at the cable car barn.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Carl Nolte\/S.F. Chronicle<\/p>\n
Muni calls the electric system \u201cthe heart of the cable car barn.\u201d Replacing the electric plant will be done in stages over seven years, hopefully while keeping the cable cars running. \u201cIt\u2019s like doing surgery,\u201d Chin said.<\/p>\n
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The cost: about $31.2 million, mostly from the federal BUILD grant fund. The key to the project is an electric room where 12,000-volt power from Pacific Gas and Electric Co. is stepped down to usable voltage.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s a plain-looking room lined with gray boxlike equipment and doors labeled \u201chigh voltage.\u201d You can feel the electricity in the air.<\/p>\n
The equipment was top of the line in 1984, but Federal Pacific Electric Corp., which built and installed the equipment, has gone out of business.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cIt doesn\u2019t exist anymore,\u201d Chin said. \u201cIt\u2019s antiquated. They don\u2019t even make the parts. We have to replace it.\u201d<\/p>\n
![\"Workers]()
<\/p>\n
Workers install a new sheave to turn cable cars around at Powell and Market streets in San Francisco. The cable that runs the cars is wrapped around the sheave so it travels in a loop.\u00a0<\/p>\n
San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency<\/p>\n
The new room will be upstairs, closer to where the cable cars are stored between runs, a new electric room to keep an antique cable car operation working every day. Six years is the timeline.<\/p>\n
The project has a San Francisco mix. Some of the managers, like Bergesen, had other city jobs but always wanted to work on the cables. Others, like Schroeder, the stationary engineer, are cable car lifers.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cI was born and raised in San Francisco,\u201d Schroeder said. \u201cIt\u2019s a natural for me to work on the best thing in the city. When they offered me this job, I felt so high you could have peeled me off the ceiling.\u201d<\/p>\n
Chin, however, is a New Yorker with a long history in New York City Transit. He came west, drawn to the cable car project, a challenge. \u201cThe cable car project is iconic,\u201d he said. And only in San Francisco.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Workers install a new sheave to turn cable cars around at Powell and Market streets in San Francisco.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":349800,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[184,7,3768,101,103,102,104,106,105,3766],"class_list":["post-349799","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-san-francisco","tag-bay-area","tag-california","tag-muni","tag-san-francisco","tag-san-francisco-headlines","tag-san-francisco-news","tag-sf","tag-sf-headlines","tag-sf-news","tag-transit"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/349799","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=349799"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/349799\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/349800"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=349799"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=349799"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=349799"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}