Tale of the rail: the Bay Area’s electric transportation network

Those who switch from private car to public transit have many options in the Bay Area: trains, buses, even cable cars. But before there was AC Transit or BART, there was the Key System: a privately-owned mass transit company that operated electric railcars, streetcars and ferries. The Key System linked ten East Bay cities and San Francisco.

It started in 1903, and quickly replaced horse-drawn carriages and steam trains as ways to travel between cities in the area. The Key System also built parks and hotels to encourage weekend travel on its trains–the Claremont Hotel in the Berkeley Hills is the most famous example. Reporter Tasneem Raja has this story.

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TASNEEM RAJA: In 1903, a brand new train system came to the Bay Area.

RICHARD SCHWARTZ: It was unbelievable. The Key System was the future, and everybody knew it.

Richard Schwartz is a local historian who's studied the Key System. It ran from 1903 to 1960, a network of trains, streetcars and ferries that connected ten cities: Oakland, Berkeley and Alameda, Emeryville, Piedmont, San Leandro, and further north, Richmond, Albany and El Cerrito. They connected to San Francisco by a train line across the Bay Bridge, and a ferry pier that stretched 16,000 feet over the water.

SCHWARTZ: The Key Route is called the Key Route because if you look at an old map of the pier, these slips for the ferries look like the teeth of a key, and the symbol had Oakland, Piedmont and Berkeley, and that was like the handle of the key. That's how it got its name.

Before the Key Route, the cities of the East Bay were much smaller, and it was hard to get from town to town without a car or a horse, which most people didn’t have. There was a railroad in town, a huge monopoly called the Southern Pacific Coast Railroad, which ran from Santa Cruz to Alameda and ran a ferry from Alameda to San Francisco. But the Southern Pacific was expensive, and it ran on steam.

SCHWARTZ: We think of steam as being this very romantic form of transportation, we hear that sound. But the reality was, there were huge disadvantages. The reality of a steam train is, if your windows are open when it shows up, your whole room will be filled with soot, and the stink of the soot, and the cleaning of the soot, and the noise. Not everybody wanted these.

ECHEVERRIA: Round about the early years of the twentieth century, the public was fed up.

That's Emiliano Echeverria, another local historian. He co-wrote one of the major books about these trains, called The Key System: San Francisco and the Eastshore Empire. It explains how the Key System was the first electric rail system in Northern California, and brought San Francisco into the future.

ECHEVERRIA: Electric cars were faster in their operation. They were cheaper and cleaner, and they were greener. They didn't spew out the smoke of the oil or coal that you found with steam trains. They weren't as heavy, and they started faster. They were a very effective competitor.

Nine rail lines crossed the Bay, and the original cars were bright orange, white and green, with red leather seats. They were comfortable, too.

ECHEVERRIA: These cars were often embellished with Edwardian and Victorian wood decorations. They had nice wide windows for you to look out. In those days, because people smoked a lot, they even had strikers for your matches.

In those days, everything electric was cutting-edge, like the new Bell Model 102 electric telephones. When the first Key System train embarked in 1903, it was curtains for the old Southern Pacific. Here's Richard Schwartz:

SCHWARTZ: The old Southern Pacific steam lines took about 53 minutes to get from San Francisco to Berkeley. Well, here comes Borax Smith and the Key Route, and these things were electrified. They could get you from downtown Berkeley, basically Shattuck and Center Street, to the Ferry Building in San Francisco in 37 minutes. It was unbelievable, like riding in a rocket ship. It really knocked the powerful Southern Pacific on its heels.

So who was "Borax" Smith, the man behind the Key System?

SCHWARTZ: You've probably heard "20 mule team Borax." That's him.

In case you haven't, Frances Marion Smith was a mining tycoon from Nevada. He made a fortune in the late 1800s by discovering a rich deposit of borax, a mineral used to make soap. His wife was from Oakland, and they settled here in a 40-room mansion on Park Boulevard. 

SCHWARTZ: He was kind of one of these classic, rugged, self-made men that the country was pretty good at producing in that age.

Borax Smith looked around the East Bay and saw a lot of attractive, undeveloped land, and no good way for people to get there. Here's Emiliano Echeverria.

ECHEVERRIA: He felt there was enormous opportunity to develop it more than it was, into a great metropolitan area. He started buying up small horse cars and cable cars in the East Bay and began to build an inter-urban system from that.

He reorganized those small lines and ran new streetcars on them. But his vision was bigger: he also built places for people to visit, using his streetcars.

ECHEVERRIA: This was a common practice among electric railways of the era. They used to call it the "electric parks syndrome," where a railway would build an amusement park for example, or a dance pavilion, at a strategic spot among the system, so that would generate weekend traffic. Because if your line didn't go to a specific distance on the weekend, chances are it wouldn't generate enough income to operate. For example, Idora Park in Oakland was a key system enterprise.

SCHWARTZ: Idora Park, on Telegraph Avenue. Many famous people came there to perform, Charlie Chaplin included. There was a zoo, there were parks, there were plays. It was an amazing place.

And another legendary East Bay landmark was built by the real estate division of the Key System.

SCHWARTZ: The Claremont Hotel was a Realty Syndicate endeavor at the end of the Claremont Line.   

ECHEVERRIA: The terminal of the E line used to be between two of the tennis courts at the Claremont Hotel. That lasted until 1958. You could play tennis at the Claremont Hotel, and next to you, there would be a train coming and going.

The Key System was popular from the day it opened, but just three years later, it played a major role when disaster struck in San Francisco.

SCHWARTZ: The Key Route ferry and train system were still working after the 1906 earthquake and Southern Pacific's was down for a bit. It became one of the important ways people could get out of the hell in burning San Francisco.

ECHEVERRIA: Many San Francisco residents moved to Oakland permanently to get away from the city and to start a new life. The key system had a lot to do with their decision.

And in the East Bay, the five-cent electric streetcars made life easier.

SCHWARTZ: It helped bring prices down, because it made goods more available. You didn't have to go to Oakland now, to get the lowest prices. That made a difference and it helped keep things more local.                             

So how would you get to, say, downtown San Francisco from the UC Berkeley campus, riding the Key System?

ECHEVERRIA: The F bus is the old original line that the Key System built, which ran to Berkeley. It ran down Shattuck Avenue, Adeline Street and ultimately ran down a right of way over to 40th and San Pablo, and went through the railroad yards and out into the Bay, where you would get off the train in the middle of the Bay and transfer to a ferry boat which would take you to San Francisco's Ferry Building, which would land you at the foot of Market Street.

And that trip would cost about fifty cents. Five dollars today. So what happened to Borax Smith and his electric vision? Well, the company took on too much debt by building transit and real estate. Smith went bankrupt in 1912 and was forced out of the company.

SCHWARTZ: He had like 24 million dollars of his own money invested in it. It's like what just happened with the banks. It shows up like a sledgehammer one night and knocks you out. And there was no government bailout, and down he went.                                                                 

Don't feel too bad for Borax Smith--he's buried at Mountain View Cemetery in "Millionaires Row." But without money for repairs, his rail lines and trains started deteriorating. Until the 50s when some lines could only run five to ten miles an hour because the track was so bad. Finally, the whole system was sold to Alameda and Contra Costa counties in 1958, and the new publicly-owned AC Transit opened in 1960. As for the Key System's trains and streetcars:

ECHEVERRIA: The key system's streetcars for the most part were burned in various scrap yards. A few survive in railroad museums. A few survive as restaurants scattered around northern and southern California. The inter-urban trains, about a third of those went to Buenos Aires, Argentina, and they ran until the 1970s.

For Crosscurrents, I'm Tasneem Raja.  

Tasneem Raja is a student reporter at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism.