Author Topic: San Francisco Muni car for sale  (Read 1268 times)

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Richard230

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on: February 03, 2023, 02:49:54 pm
A friend that I have been riding with for years has an old San Francisco Muni car for sale on Craigslist. I thought you might like to see photos of the vehicle. Kind of interesting. He used to use it as an office for his trucking business years ago, but he is now retired and just wants it gone from his property. High bidder gets the vehicle, but moving it off of the property and somewhere else might cost more than the thing is worth. Although he says that he has already received 20 offers, in addition to an inquiry from a San Francisco newspaper reporter who would wants to write an article about the train car: https://sfbay.craigslist.org/eby/for/d/richmond-muni-car-for-sale/7572060179.html
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Richard230

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Reply #1 on: February 03, 2023, 10:36:35 pm
My friend just sent me an email letting me know that he now has 22 inquires. He is leaning toward a fellow who owns a farm in Sonoma, CA and wants to use it for an office. He also received a message from the San Francisco Chronicle reporter who wants to interview him and his wife for an article in the newspaper. That should be an interesting article. If it gets published I will post the information here.
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him a layin

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Reply #2 on: February 03, 2023, 11:27:45 pm
i was going to suggest these people, but it's a long drive...
https://www.nctransportationmuseum.org/


Richard230

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Reply #3 on: February 04, 2023, 12:54:29 am
Moving that rail car is going to be a real hassle for anyone who buys it and wants to transport it any distance.
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Leofric

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Reply #4 on: February 04, 2023, 09:55:19 pm
Moving that rail car is going to be a real hassle for anyone who buys it and wants to transport it any distance.
My father was responsible for obtaining an old railway carriage which was used for years as the pavilion for the local village cricket team. God knows how he got it transported to the cricket field.


AzCal Retred

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Reply #5 on: February 04, 2023, 10:20:08 pm
Moving heavy stuff is art & science & a LOT of work. But the folks that do it professionally make it look easy.

AT the old Mohave GS in Laughlin, the main transformers were discrete phases, each 500,000 pounds without buswork, insulators or oil. There was a single spare main phase. The contract moving crew were nearly all ex-cons. They'd lay down 5' x 10' x 1" thick steel plates for a "rolling floor" over the crushed rock surrounding the transformers. Then they'd use 3" diameter maybe 36" long rods for rollers. Then like the Egyptians, they'd use the solid steel rollers to roll the old transformer out and the spare transformer in. The "pick-up" workers would pick up the spent rollers as they came out behind the moving transformer & hustle them to the front, then hand them one armed to the "insertion crew" who placed them under the leading edge. All this at 110F to 125F plus reflected heat from the black steel plate rolling floor. Knowing exactly how heavy these bars were, NOBODY on site would ever think to tangle with these boys, a good week to avoid the local bars. :o ;D ;D ;D

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Richard230

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Reply #6 on: February 16, 2023, 04:46:19 pm
Here is a link to the interesting San Francisco Chronicle regarding my friend's SF Muni car that he wants to sell.
https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/muni-streetcar-sale-17774539.php
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Richard230

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Reply #7 on: February 16, 2023, 10:46:36 pm
If you can't access the article in the link above because it is behind a paywall, here are a few more comments: My friend is taking bids. He hopes to get as much as $5K for the vehicle, but my guess is that he will take anything as long as the buyer hauls it away, which he guesses would cost at least $10K.

The news article mentioned that the SF Muni bought about 180 of those trains using a "buy American" grant from the federal government in 1970. As it turned out only Boeing was willing to supply the train cars. Since they had no idea how to design light rail cars they turned it over to their aeronautical engineers who made a mess out of the project. It didn't take long for everything to start falling apart, parts were hard to come by, could only be sourced from Boeing and the vehicles were very difficult to repair and to work on. The article said that there are only three or four of the cars remaining in the U.S. All of the others were apparently recycled over the years.
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Richard230

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Reply #8 on: February 24, 2023, 04:14:37 pm
The Muni car story hit the front page of the February 23rd issue of the (contains recycled paper) San Francisco Chronicle and continues on to page A7 for another 2/3 of the page. Quite an impressive write-up and several nice color photos. The offers to buy the Muni vehicle are still coming into the Craigslist ad, but nothing has jelled yet.
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Richard230

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Reply #9 on: February 26, 2023, 03:47:07 pm
My friend who owns the street cars told me yesterday that they had been sold and for the price that he wanted. It was sold to a family who owns a farm in Northern California. They plan to transport it to their property, fix it up and turn it into a B&B. Seems like a good idea and likely much cheaper than building a new building. He expects that the rail cars will be picked up within a week or two and finally hauled off of his storage yard to a good home. That makes him happy.

Here are some history excerpts from the San Francisco Chronicle article regarding these Muni cars that you might find interesting:

 “A Streetcar Named Undesirable” was the San Francisco Chronicle headline in 1978. That was before Boeing Vertol had delivered a single lightrail vehicle for the city’s new Muni Metro subway. By the time the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency began retiring the repair-prone cars in 1995 — decades before their intended life span was reached — they were a renowned failure. The Boeing streetcars mostly elicit happy nostalgia now. These were the Muni lines of the Dianne Feinstein/Joe Montana era of San Francisco. City residents rode the Boeing cars to the first big SF Pride events, the first 49ers Super Bowl parade and endless trips to the San Francisco Zoo and Ferry Building. San Francisco graffiti artist Nate Tan recently incorporated one on a T-shirt design.

But they were an epic disaster for the city government in the 1980s and 1990s, when they were the first fleet in the Muni Metro subway. Boeing was new to designing streetcars, and San Francisco was in a hard place after Richard Nixon pledged almost no federal money would be earmarked for cars made overseas. Backed into a corner, Boston and San Francisco each ordered more than 100 of the Boeing cars at more than $300,000 each. Market Street Railway President Rick Laubscher said Boeing Vertol, which had come from building Vietnam-era helicopters, let their hubris show when they refused to bring in experts in public transportation. “You had aerospace engineers designing these things, and it had to be space age, one way or the other,” Laubscher said. “The problem is transit vehicles are not aircraft, and the abuse they take every day in operation is a completely different thing. Components were failing all the time.”

The cars were known to passengers for their high-pitched screeching and constantly broken doors, but Muni maintenance staff knew of dozens more problems, including panels that required a blowtorch to open to make simple repairs. “It takes two guys four days to change four $100 items,” Muni General Manager William Stead griped to The Chronicle in 1988. “It should only take a few hours. We’ve lived with the problem, but now the joints are starting to come apart.”

By the mid-1990s, Muni was importing new cars from Italy and ditching the Boeing models as fast as they could, even though they barely made it to half of their promised life span. No American company has mass-produced public transit streetcars since. Muni eventually brought back the predecessor to the Boeing streetcars, the PCC streetcars named for the Presidents’ Conference Committee, to populate the historic F-line fleet, but the Boeing streetcars were mostly junked. There may be only three still in existence: The Western Railway Museum in Solano County and an Oregon museum each have one, plus the one the Fleiges have put up for sale
« Last Edit: February 26, 2023, 03:51:57 pm by Richard230 »
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Richard230

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Reply #10 on: December 17, 2023, 03:12:42 pm
The Muni Rail car was delivered to its new home on a farm earlier this year. Here is a time-lapse video of it being set up on the property and three photos of the owners and the rail car in place. They plan to turn into an overnight rental once it is renovated.
https://streamable.com/9ef32f
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