notes.husk.org/likes images.

I have been looking forward to this for the last five years. I was on the on the board of directors of Market Street Railway - the non-profit preservation partner of the SFMTA - and among a handful of people who selected the paint schemes of four-doubled ended streetcars about to be restored.

This is will actually be the first any streetcar has ever been painted in the Market Street Railway Company “zip-stripe” livery. The company had planned to use double-ended PCC streetcars to modernize its fleet, but the company was bought out by Muni before the order was placed.

Muni’s policy regarding the historic PCC streetcars to only paint them in authentic paint schemes used by the dozens of cities that used this type of streetcar, but the company had designed a livery for the planned order and even gone so far as making models.

The other half of my pitch was also don’t have a single working streetcar representing San Francisco’s second largest transit operator, but everyone along the way seemed to think it was appropriate and a good idea. Everyone liked the idea and Muni’s final decision for all four was exactly what I had hoped for:

No. 1011 was painted for the Market Street Railway Co., no. 1009 for Dallas, Texas (a city not yet represented and a splash of red to the fleet), and both no. 1006 & 1008 in the Muni “wings” livery they arrived from the factory painted in.

There was a gamification aspect to this because having two in the same paint scheme makes some streetcars rarer than other, while also making sure Muni rightly gets the most representation.