Dark Passage to the Powell Street Cable Cars

Cable car 510 from pg. 334

Over at Orange Crate Art Michael Leddy wrote an interesting follow-up to his Harry's Wagon post. The location looks like the famous cable car turntable at Powell and Market in San Francisco.I can only make out the car number, 520, in middle photo. According to Mr. Smallwood in his book, The White Front Cars of San Francisco, 520 and 510, shown over on the left, were from the same batch manufactured in 1891 by Carter Brothers.

Cable Car 514 from pg. 332

I've shown 514 over on the right only to note that you can see a piece of the façade of The Owl Drug Co. in the upper right corner of the photo. It's quite different from that shown in Dark Passage - an earlier incarnation maybe? 514 was manufactured by Mahoney Brothers in 1887.

To wrap up his discussion of the Powell Street cable cars, Mr. Smallwood mentions: It is interesting to note that the Powell-Mason cable line has provided service from terminal to terminal over the same route, using the same method of propulsion and operated by the same cars, for more that 90 years! Certainly this must be a world's record for city transit.

So, if Dark Passage was made in 1947, car 520 had been in operation for around 56 years - not a bad service life.

Was Harry's Wagon a White Front Car?

Car 990 began service 1 Aug 1933; pg 186

Over at Orange Crate Art there's an interesting post about a diner called Harry's Wagon that appeared in the 1947 noir Dark Passage. The movie is set in San Francisco, and stars Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall.

The diner reminded me of the streetcars in Charles Smallwood's The White Front Cars of San Francisco that was published by Interurbans in 1978*. Harry's was a real place, so I leafed through the book to see if by some wild chance Harry's Wagon might be in there amongst photos of repurposed cars. No dice. 

Naturally, the book is jammed full of streetcars that look quite similar to Harry's Wagon, but there's no obvious match, and no reference to that diner. One major difference: Harry's has a 4 window front, and all the similar streetcars had only 3. Maybe Harry's was reno-ed? Can't say for sure.

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*I bought this book back in January after seeing an ad for it in an old issue of Railroad Model Craftsman. On a lark I looked for it online, and found one for $5 plus $10 shipping. I bit and the rest is reading history :-)