San Francisco’s signature cable cars came into being in the 19th century as a way to navigate the city’s steep hills, which were difficult for horse-drawn streetcars to manage, especially in wet weather. The first line, Clay Street Hill Railroad, launched in 1873. It featured a cable car equipped with a gripping mechanism that clamped onto an underground steel cable. Powered by a steam engine, the cable hauled the vehicle up the sharply sloping road. Other cable car companies soon followed suit with their own lines. However, the 1906 earthquake and fires devastated the system. Faster, more efficient electric streetcars replaced many cable car lines on all but the steepest hills. In 1964, San Francisco’s remaining cable cars were named a National Historic Landmark.

Today, about 40 cable cars remain in operation, owned and operated by SFMTA. Given the extensive wear and tear these cars undergo, they periodically need to be rehabilitated. In many cases, they have to be completely dismantled in a containment zone to protect workers from hazardous materials, then reconstructed with new, specially made wood and metal pieces.

In 2018, when SFMTA asked the carpenters to ready another cable car to replace one being pulled from revenue service, McCarron suggested reconstructing #8. “It had already been disassembled,” he says. “I told the division superintendent, ‘We don’t have to take the car apart. That’ll shave a couple of months off, as far as working on it.’”

So #8 was hauled out of the weeds to SFMTA’s carpentry shop in the Dogpatch neighborhood. It was little more than a bare frame. The carpenters reconstructed the frame and body with custom-made wooden pieces—Alaskan cedar for the roof and white oak for the rest. “We make everything here,” McCarron says. “We try to save as much of the car as we can. But there’s only so much you can do.” The SFMTA’s Special Machine Shop crafted metal brackets and plates as needed. The carpentry shop maintains a library of patterns for everything from the pocket door guides to the rods and brackets that support leather grips for passengers to hold on to.

According to records, #8 had been previously renovated in 1958. But at that time, restoring cars in a period-correct way was not as high a priority. “They changed the roof, they put in square windows,” McCarron says. “When we got it here, we wanted to put it back the way it was.” Fortunately, SFMTA has copies of the original plans (slightly updated over the decades), as well as a database of digitized historic photos of cable cars, so the carpenters can create accurate reconstructions. “We have all the details—the way the stanchions are made, the way the side panels, body panels, cornice trims, and window trims are made,” McCarron says. “So we build them the same way that they were built back then. Obviously, we’re using more modern tools.”

There are a few departures from the original methods. “Back in the day, the cars were assembled with the wood still raw, and then they were painted. Now, for example, we’ll spot-prime each mortise and tenon before gluing them together. With raw wood, that’s where you’d get rot over time.” Today’s cable cars are also equipped with LED headlights.

The reconstruction process took nearly three years. In May of 2021, the carpenters shipped the finished car to SFMTA’s Cable Car Barn for installation of cameras and the GPS chip that links to the NextBus system for tracking arrival times. Soon it will hit the streets for routine safety inspections before rejoining the fleet.