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TRANSACTIONS NEWSLETTER ONLINE

November/December 2006

Greta Ericson Distinguished Service Award:
Rodger “Tim” Reilly

Reilly
For 22 years, master craftsman Tim Reilly lovingly restored parts on San Francisco’s aging fleet of historic cable cars, and helped build 11 replica cars. (Photo: Noah Berger)

Every time a San Francisco cable car bell rings, it is a tribute to the handiwork of master craftsman Rodger Reilly (who goes by his middle name, “Tim”). For over 22 years, Reilly plied his trade in Muni’s cable car carpentry shop in the city’s eclectic Dogpatch neighborhood.

The world’s first cable-powered street railway was built in San Francisco in 1873. In the decades that followed, many cities in the United States and elsewhere also built cable railways to replace horse-powered streetcars, and then replaced those systems with electric streetcars. Fittingly, San Francisco is now the last city in the world to operate cable cars.

Since no other place has them — and the only things on a cable car that can be store-bought are screws, bolts and nuts — the cars in today’s fleet are all hand-built and maintained in Muni’s carpentry shop. Bob Harris, the shop supervisor, described the process: “It takes a skilled crew of four carpenters and a pattern maker over a year to turn out a single car.” The pattern maker crafts models for every piece of cable car hardware out of wood, metal or plastic. These patterns are then sent to a foundry to become molds, which are then used to cast actual cable car parts.

“Every cable car in San Francisco today probably has a part that I had something to do with,” the 66-year old Reilly said. “It’s rewarding to know that, while the system is over 125 years old, it hasn’t changed that much mechanically, and it still runs well.”

Reilly, who lives in Alameda, joined Muni’s shop in 1983 during the systemwide rehabilitation that included replacing all the cable channels and tracks, rebuilding the cable car barn, and repairing the aging fleet of 40 cable cars. Since the rehabilitation, the shop’s veteran staff has built 11 more cars. “Each brand-new car — which is made of wood, glass, brass and steel — takes about 18 months and costs approximately $1 million to build,” explained Harris.

And the work has become more difficult since Reilly retired at the end of 2005; in fact Bob Harris and Muni are still trying to replace him. “What I’m going to miss about Tim is having him as a resource,” Harris said. “He was the only pattern maker here for 20 years. I still call him up and ask him how to do things.”
— Karin Betts

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