By Carl Nolte, Contributor June 6, 2026 - San Francisco Chronicle
Usually there’s a crowd around the end of the cable car line at Powell and Market streets, where two of San Francisco’s three lines begin what Tony Bennett called a “climb halfway to the stars.”
That is the sentimental view of the world-famous cable car operation. It’s a 19th century anachronism and tourist attraction, the symbol of the city. But the real work takes place mostly out of sight, under the streets and in the world’s only cable car barn and powerhouse. It’s the heart of the system.
Like the human heart, you have to be careful. Sometimes you need preventive medicine, sometimes surgery.
In San Francisco, even the cable cars need heart surgery
Quick and Dirty
Usually there’s a crowd around the end of the cable car line at Powell and Market streets, where two of San Francisco’s three lines begin what Tony Bennett called a “climb halfway to the stars.”
That is the sentimental view of the world-famous cable car operation. It’s a 19th century anachronism and tourist attraction, the symbol of the city. But the real work takes place mostly out of sight, under the streets and in the world’s only cable car barn and powerhouse. It’s the heart of the system.
Like the human heart, you have to be careful. Sometimes you need preventive medicine, sometimes surgery.
There are big plans afoot to upgrade and improve the systems that make the cable cars run. Most of it will be out of sight.
But on Wednesday morning, one of the first phases of the work was plain to see. The Powell Street cars were shut down while a big crane from Sheedy Drayage was at work to open an underground pit just behind the end of the track where the cars are turned. The crane lifted out a 10-foot-wide wheel called a sheave (pronounced “shiv”) that is the key to cable operation. The old sheave was pulled out and replaced.
A rigger lowers the cable car sheave, one of 21 in the system.
Carl Nolte/S.F. Chronicle
The operation needs a bit of explaining because it’s out of sight. The endless cable that runs the cars is wrapped around the sheave so it runs in a loop like an old-fashioned clothesline. There are 21 of these devices on the cable system. Powell and Market’s is among the largest.
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The cable cars, of course, pull themselves along by grasping and releasing the underground cables. The cable system was invented for transit use in 1873. No sheave, no cable car.
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Sheedy and city crews disconnected the cable, pulled out the old wheel and replaced it with a new one. The big wheels hung in the sunlight for just a moment and then moved down into the darkness.
“The work we are doing here is not like anything else in the world,” said Rob Bergesen, the mechanical and shop superintendent for the cable cars. The technology is 150 years old, and most of the parts are unique. “You don’t buy components like this, so we make them. You can’t run down to O’Reilly’s and get them.”
Cable car motors are displayed at the cable car barn in San Francisco.
Carl Nolte/S.F. Chronicle
Bergesen is proud of his workforce. Sheedy provided the crane and the riggers, the city and Muni the labor. The job took all day. “Under budget, too,” he said. The cost: about $750,000 in regional transit funds.
But Powell and Market is just the tip of the proverbial iceberg. The rest of the work is mostly out of public sight. It’s electric and mechanical.
The public can get a bit of a feel for the mechanics of the place at the Cable Car Museum at Washington and Mason streets in Chinatown, but I got a personal tour. I’ve always been fascinated by the cable cars; I used to live on Russian Hill and rode them every day. Still do, when I get a chance.
Inside the powerhouse is the belly of the beast, the smell of oil and grease, the hum of the electric motors, the big wheel sheaves that turn slowly, powering the steel cables, each six steel strands around a core, running about 9½ mph. They run through the car barn like steel snakes, always moving through the winding machinery, into a tunnel and then under the street, invisible, kept in place by a system of pulleys and beams, up and down hills and around curves. There are four cables for three lines. The longest stretches 5 miles.
In the old days, stationary steam engines supplied the power. Now it’s run by four electric motors, each 500 horsepower.
San Francisco native Steve Schroeder, a stationary engineer for the SFMTA, said, “When they offered me this job, I felt so high you could have peeled me off the ceiling.”
Carl Nolte/S.F. Chronicle
The barn and powerhouse were built in 1888, badly damaged in the 1906 earthquake and rebuilt soon after. The place was in bad shape by the 1980s and was completely overhauled starting in 1984.
“A big job,” said Steve Schroeder, a stationary engineer. “Nothing was left but three walls and a hole in the ground.”
The place was rebuilt, but that was 42 years ago, and now the electrical infrastructure that powers it all is beyond its useful life.
“It hasn’t been done since 1984,” said Quon Chin, a San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency executive who is planning the project. “It’s a big project. It’s huge. It’s absolutely needed.”
Quon Chin, an executive with the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency, with the winding gear sheave at the cable car barn.
Carl Nolte/S.F. Chronicle
Muni calls the electric system “the heart of the cable car barn.” Replacing the electric plant will be done in stages over seven years, hopefully while keeping the cable cars running. “It’s like doing surgery,” Chin said.
The cost: about $31.2 million, mostly from the federal BUILD grant fund. The key to the project is an electric room where 12,000-volt power from Pacific Gas and Electric Co. is stepped down to usable voltage.
It’s a plain-looking room lined with gray boxlike equipment and doors labeled “high voltage.” You can feel the electricity in the air.
The equipment was top of the line in 1984, but Federal Pacific Electric Corp., which built and installed the equipment, has gone out of business.
“It doesn’t exist anymore,” Chin said. “It’s antiquated. They don’t even make the parts. We have to replace it.”
Workers install a new sheave to turn cable cars around at Powell and Market streets in San Francisco. The cable that runs the cars is wrapped around the sheave so it travels in a loop.
San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency
The new room will be upstairs, closer to where the cable cars are stored between runs, a new electric room to keep an antique cable car operation working every day. Six years is the timeline.
The project has a San Francisco mix. Some of the managers, like Bergesen, had other city jobs but always wanted to work on the cables. Others, like Schroeder, the stationary engineer, are cable car lifers.
“I was born and raised in San Francisco,” Schroeder said. “It’s a natural for me to work on the best thing in the city. When they offered me this job, I felt so high you could have peeled me off the ceiling.”
Chin, however, is a New Yorker with a long history in New York City Transit. He came west, drawn to the cable car project, a challenge. “The cable car project is iconic,” he said. And only in San Francisco.
Greg