San Francisco's iconic cable car system is both the world's oldest and the only one still operating, but that doesn't mean that the cable cars themselves are all vintage. As working transportation vehicles constructed largely of wood, they have a limited lifespan and periodically need to be rebuilt, and new ones even have to be built from the ground up.

Parts are hard to come by for vehicles that had their heyday in the 19th century, therefore the San Francisco Municipal Railway employs their own team of skilled craftsman to do a majority of the work in-house. This work is done in an incongruously modern workshop next to a bus yard, far from the remaining cable car lines. Once a cable car is ready for service, it's trucked three miles to the cable car barn at Washington & Mason Streets.

While the shop primarily works on cable cars, they also craft parts for the city's vintage streetcar fleet.