United Railroads of San Francisco - 1900's circa California Unissued Railway Stock Certificate

Unissued Stock printed by American Bank Note Company, New York. Nice looking stock! 6 rows of coupons on bottom. The Market Street Railway Company was a commercial streetcar and bus operator in San Francisco. The company was named after the famous Market Street of that city, which formed the core of its transportation network. Over the years, the company was also known as the Market Street Railroad Company, the Market Street Cable Railway Company and the United Railroads of San Francisco.

However transit technology was still moving on, and the new electric streetcar quickly proved to cheaper to build and operate than the cable car, and capable of climbing all but San Francisco's steepest hills. In 1893, Stanford died and the company was taken over by the Southern Pacific Railroad. The company was again renamed to the Market Street Railway Company, and began the process of converting its lines to electric traction. In 1895, MSRy inaugurated service on the Fillmore Counterbalance, which was the steepest rail line to date, operating as a hybrid of counterbalance funicular and electric traction. In 1902, the Southern Pacific Railroad sold their San Francisco railways to a syndicate of eastern investors, led by Patrick Calhoun, which consolidated with other San Francisco lines into a new company called the United Railroads of San Francisco (URR). Conversion to electricity was resisted by opponents like Rudolph Spreckels and other property owners who objected to what they saw as ugly overhead lines on the major thoroughfares of the city center. At 5:12 am on April 18, 1906, those objections were swept away as the great San Francisco earthquake struck. The race to rebuild the city allowed the company to replace all but the steepest of its cable car lines with electric streetcar lines. Read more at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_Street_Railway_(transit_operator)

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