San Francisco - Part 3

The AGU meeting pretty much ended by noon or so and I was feeling pretty burned out on listening to presentations and watching PowerPoints. I hung around at the Toolik Field Station booth for a bit while finishing my coffee. While there, I heard about the Cable Car Museum being somewhere around Nob Hill so I headed out. I've never been there that I know of. After what seemed like endless climbing up hills including some sidewalks that were steep enough to require steps, I finally reached to top. I wasn't sure that I wanted to head downhill for the two blocks to the museum.

Free admission! (There isn't much around here that's free.) And it as more than just a museum as the cables for the lines run through the building. This is at least one location where that drives the cables for four of the lines. I don't know if this is the only location or not. This is a shot of the motors that are driving the cable. They had a lot of old cable cars, tools, uniforms and such as well as a nice gift shop. It was pretty loud in there and I suspect that it probably affects the hearing of long time employees.

This is down in the sheave room under the street. One of the locations where where the cable is guided around corners. The museum is near the intersection of California and Hyde Streets where the cable cars release one cable and coast before they grab onto the next cable. I always assumed that there were some significant tunnels under the streets for the cable but I didn't realize how large the tunnels were. This was about a ten second exposure and it wasn't anywhere near that bright down there. The only view is through armored windows which are the angled blurry lines in the photo.

After the museum, I headed to Japantown which is mostly a shopping and restaurant area. I had a bowl of cold buckwheat noodles with some vegetables. Very refreshing. Total walking so far today is just under ten miles for a total of 65 miles for the week.