Hidden San Francisco - San Francisco Railway Museum
Saturday, May 2, 2009 at 07:40PM 
This is a very different museum from the Cable Car Museum, but like the Cable Car Museum, it is probably not well known, even by locals. The SF Railway Museum is a stone’s throw from the Ferry Building, but tucked away enough that you could easily walk by it without noticing.
Don’t let its shoebox size fool you; this museum is packed with history, information, and in sharp contrast to the Cable Car Museum, stuff you actually want to buy. It appears the organization that runs the museum commissioned artists to create very contemporary yet historically rooted items to sell here. There are t-shirts, bags, posters, greeting cards, and magnets that are custom made for the museum. But the other items on sale here too are extremely relevant: San Francisco history books, replicas of placards and station names, postcards of historical photos of streetcars and cable cars, and my favorite of all, the Moleskine travel notebook for San Francisco. I had just picked one of these up for our upcoming trip to Tokyo, but I spend so much time in San Francisco, I had to have this one too.
There are two touch screen monitors which display historic movie footage of streetcars and a visual display of all of the streetcars in the SF stable which you can touch each image to find out information about where the car came from, when it was first put in service in San Francisco, and all the standard measurements (weight, powertrain, seating capacity, etc.).
The staff (of one, when I was there) is friendly and knowledgeable. It’s quite nice to have a person working there that genuinely cares about the history of the streetcars in San Francisco.
I’m not a train freak or anything, but these streetcars represent functional pieces of history, and more than that, moving pieces of art.
More pictures of historic streetcars.
The San Francisco Railway Museum is located at 77 Steuart Street and is open Wed-Sun 10am to 6pm.
museum, railway, san francisco, streetcar in Reports From the Field, San Francisco
Reader Comments (1)
Carry on the good work!