Welcome back to Photo Friday – my little way of taking a break from San Francisco Real Estate and instead blogging about our great City’s past instead. All photos are published with permission from the San Francisco History Center and San Francisco Public Library.

So this last week, Curbed SF, WHAT IM SEEING dot com and SFist all mentioned MUNI’s latest Green/Wi-Fi concoction.

I still haven’t really figured out the benefit of wi-fi on a (usually crowded bus) but maybe I’m just not as technologically advanced as MUNI’s new target audience. (I just hopethat the MUNI drivers don’t get too distracted by the new wi-fi and start mowing down even MORE innocent pedestrians.)

Regardless, this isn’t MUNI’s first “New” bus.

Back in 1947, MUNI introduced its first trackless electric bus.

The newscopy on February 1947 read:

“THE NEW–This new trackless trolley, first of 16 such to be ordered for the E Line, will go into service to replace the old ‘enter at center’ streetcars now on the line.”

According to the SFMTA site, June 8, 1947 was the “last day of streetcar service on Muni’s E streetcar line, with trolley buses and motor buses taking over service the next day and full trolley bus operation shortly thereafter. This was the first post-war conversion of a streetcar line to trolley bus service – the E-line conversion had been planned several years before, but had been delayed by the war effort. (The E and R trolley bus lines were combined, and the new service was called the E Union-Howard. The E line was re-designated the 41 line in February 1949, a time when much of the Muni-Market Street Railway consolidated service was renamed.)”

The original E Line was The E Union – a streetcar route that ran from the Ferry Building to the Presidio via The Embarcadero, Washington/Jackson, Columbus, Union, Larkin, Vallejo, Franklin, Union, Baker and Greenwich into the Presidio. [Wikepedia]

As always, I hope you enjoyed this week’s Photo Friday and the random bit of San Francisco history it provided you with. Hope you have a great weekend!