Trams

Maybe you can take the girl out of Melbourne but not the Melbourne out of the girl.  I have such a fond feeling for trams and I loooove the cable variety of San Francisco. The trams themselves are cute, the hills they navigate are, to stay the least, spectacularly steep, and the mechanism behind their operation boggles my mind. It is the last manually operated cable tram in operation in the world.

It is hard to show how steep the streets are but if you straighten out the street, the buildings lean more than the Leaning Tower of Pisa.

The trams fly down the hills and the conductor applies the back brakes to slow the tram, but not by much!

And of course, there is Lombard Street, the crookedest street in the world. If you look carefully you can see all the cars winding down through the hydrangeas. The residents pay a couple of guys to keep order and amuse the gawkers.

Back to the trams.

The trams are turned by hand on a wooden turntable

The trams have no motors of their own, but a mechanism which grips a cable running below the road. For some reason, Blogger thinks I have included enough photos. So I will have to show you the workings of the trams in the next post!