Meet Carl, our Guest Speaker, at our General Meeting tomorrow at New St. Mary's Cathedral.
Autumn General Meeting with Carl Nolte Guest Speaker
By Carl Nolte, Contributor Dec 6, 2025 - San Francisco Chronicle
When Rick Laubscher was a little boy, maybe 5 years old, his mother took him downtown on the streetcar to the old San Francisco Civic Auditorium to see the circus, billed as the greatest show on Earth. “I don’t remember anything about the circus,” Laubscher said the other afternoon. “What I remember is the streetcar ride.”
The streetcar they rode was running on the L-Taraval line and was one of those big, hulking old Muni cars San Franciscans called “iron monsters” that roared and rumbled and clanked through the Twin Peaks Tunnel and then down Market Street. Those cars were obsolete even in the forward-looking 1950s, and plans were afoot to get those clunky old railcars off Market Street and into a subway.
But the streetcar was a wonder to Laubscher, and he loves to tell that story. It comes with a twist — San Franciscans got the subway, but the streetcars stayed on the surface of Market Street, thanks in part to Laubscher’s efforts. Full circle.
Laubscher is 76 now and president and CEO of a nonprofit organization called Market Street Railway, an advocacy group that keeps an eye on the city’s vintage transit — streetcars, cable cars and even buses of a certain age. “We keep San Francisco’s vintage transit on track” is their motto.
Officially, the group is the preservation partner of the San Francisco Municipal Railway. Muni operates the system, but the Market Street Railway is the cheerleader, watchdog, lobbying group and support base for the cable cars and the wildly successful F-Market streetcar line that runs from Castro and Market streets to the Ferry Building and along the Embarcadero to Fisherman’s Wharf.
The F line, which features streamlined cars that were new when Harry Truman was president, is no Toonerville Trolley operation. It runs 20 hours a day seven days a week and carries nearly 20,000 riders on weekdays. It’s part of the city’s fabric.
Many of the cars are painted in the colors of other transit systems — Mexico City, St. Louis, Dallas, Brooklyn, San Diego among them. Three of the 17 streamlined cars are painted in the Muni’s old green and cream colors — known to their admirers as “green torpedoes.” On occasion, orange tram cars from Milan take to the streets.
A ride on S.F.’s ‘iron monster’ as a boy sparked a lifelong dedication to city’s streetcars
Greg
Quick and Dirty
When Rick Laubscher was a little boy, maybe 5 years old, his mother took him downtown on the streetcar to the old San Francisco Civic Auditorium to see the circus, billed as the greatest show on Earth. “I don’t remember anything about the circus,” Laubscher said the other afternoon. “What I remember is the streetcar ride.”
The streetcar they rode was running on the L-Taraval line and was one of those big, hulking old Muni cars San Franciscans called “iron monsters” that roared and rumbled and clanked through the Twin Peaks Tunnel and then down Market Street. Those cars were obsolete even in the forward-looking 1950s, and plans were afoot to get those clunky old railcars off Market Street and into a subway.
But the streetcar was a wonder to Laubscher, and he loves to tell that story. It comes with a twist — San Franciscans got the subway, but the streetcars stayed on the surface of Market Street, thanks in part to Laubscher’s efforts. Full circle.
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Laubscher is 76 now and president and CEO of a nonprofit organization called Market Street Railway, an advocacy group that keeps an eye on the city’s vintage transit — streetcars, cable cars and even buses of a certain age. “We keep San Francisco’s vintage transit on track” is their motto.
Officially, the group is the preservation partner of the San Francisco Municipal Railway. Muni operates the system, but the Market Street Railway is the cheerleader, watchdog, lobbying group and support base for the cable cars and the wildly successful F-Market streetcar line that runs from Castro and Market streets to the Ferry Building and along the Embarcadero to Fisherman’s Wharf.
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The F line, which features streamlined cars that were new when Harry Truman was president, is no Toonerville Trolley operation. It runs 20 hours a day seven days a week and carries nearly 20,000 riders on weekdays. It’s part of the city’s fabric.
Many of the cars are painted in the colors of other transit systems — Mexico City, St. Louis, Dallas, Brooklyn, San Diego among them. Three of the 17 streamlined cars are painted in the Muni’s old green and cream colors — known to their admirers as “green torpedoes.” On occasion, orange tram cars from Milan take to the streets.
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On sunny summer days, Muni will roll out one of the three tram cars from Blackpool, an English beach resort. These cars look like the offspring of a streetcar and a boat.
Because this piece is about historic transit vehicles, it comes with a bit of history. San Francisco has always had its share of admirers of the past, but the historic streetcar movement had its key moment on a spring day in 1979. That’s when Maurice Klebolt, head of an obscure organization called the Citizens Advisory Panel for Transit Improvement, sidled up to Mayor Dianne Feinstein as she was presiding over an event on the steps of City Hall. Klebolt, a part-time Muni driver and full-time City Hall gadfly, presented the mayor with a bouquet of red roses and then pointed to his real gift — a red tramcar from Hamburg, Germany, mounted on rusty rails atop a flatbed truck. Klebolt and his associates had brought it over from Europe to present to the city.
He’d convinced the Germans that the old tram would be a great addition for a fleet of historic streetcars in San Francisco. The only problem was that he’d never told San Francisco Muni about the gift. So here it was: a dozen red roses and a somewhat battered red tram car.
The wide “iron monster” streetcar, this one built in 1914 and shown in 2008, was a workhorse of the San Francisco system before the city began importing vintage cars from other cities.
Kim Komenich/S.F. Chronicle
The mayor offered an icy smile at this white elephant of a gift. But the Muni brass fixed it up, got it to run and billed it as the Red Baron, and it did indeed become part of a streetcar renaissance. The incident offered a valuable lesson to Laubscher: Direct action was better than talk.
This all came in handy when the city shut down the cable cars for a massive overhaul that took two years. Klebolt and his associates — the Chronicle described them as “nostalgia buffs and critics” — convinced the mayor and civic bigwigs that a summerlong trolley festival featuring vintage streetcars from Japan, Germany, Russia and New Orleans could lure tourists to a cable car-less San Francisco.
The first trolley festival in 1982 was a big hit. Ordinary citizens and tourists loved it. So was a second festival the next year. Even skeptical politicians were won over.
The next thing you know, rail advocates and civic leaders began to realize that vintage transit could be operated by Muni on a regular basis as a real transit line; it would be good for business and tourism both. The city passed a bond issue and opened the F line on Market. The demolition of the Embarcadero Freeway meant the line could be extended all the way to Fisherman’s Wharf, part of a dream of a waterfront streetcar line Klebolt and his pals had.
Klebolt didn’t live to see the Embarcadero extension. He died of a heart attack in 1988.
In the meantime, his collection of streetcar fans had morphed into an organization called the Market Street Railway. Laubscher, a former television reporter and media executive who knew his way around City Hall, had taken a leadership role.
He still talks about that childhood streetcar ride, a small city adventure long ago. Thanks to a lot of effort by Muni leadership, Muni workers and citizen advocates, modern kids can still do the same thing.
The vintage cars he says, “are not static displays. They work every day as they were designed to do. Those cars carried millions of people as part of their daily life. These are the cars your parents rode, and here they are again. They are part of the continuity of San Francisco.’’