The Free Nob Hill Museum Where You Can Watch the Cables That Pull San Francisco's Cable Cars
The Cable Car Museum on Nob Hill is free, and it isn't just exhibits. It's built into the working Washington-Mason powerhouse, so you can watch the giant wheels that pull the Powell, Hyde, Mason and California cables and descend to the cavern beneath the street.
By the Bay Area Brief staff · Edited by Seamus McKenna · · 3 min read
Colorful Victorian houses on a sunny street in Pacific Heights, San Francisco. Photo: Nicolas Lannuzel / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0 (cropped, resized and color-graded). Archive photo of the area; not a photo of the events in this story.
At 1201 Mason St. is one of the city's best free stops, and it's a working piece of infrastructure.
Inside the powerhouse
The museum shares a building with the cable car power house and car barn. From two galleries, you can look down on the motors and winding wheels that drive the cables. Signs over each one, reading "Hyde," "California," "Mason" and "Powell," show which line it pulls. You can also go down below the corner of Washington and Mason to see the cavern where the cables turn on huge sheaves before heading out under the streets.
The cars
The collection includes Clay Street Hill Railroad grip car No. 8, the only surviving car from the first cable car company, and Sutter Street Railway grip car 46 and trailer 54 from the 1870s.
The history
The museum opened in 1974 and is run by the Friends of the Cable Car Museum, a nonprofit. Its exhibits cover the system from the first run in 1873 to the near-loss of the cable cars and the 1982-84 rebuild.
Visiting
Admission is free. The museum says it is open daily except Mondays. The Powell-Mason and Powell-Hyde lines stop nearby.
Sources
This article is an original summary based on the following reporting. We encourage readers to visit the original sources for full coverage.
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