Key System - Legacy

Legacy

Signs of the system still remain.

• The elevated loop at San Francisco's Transbay Transit Terminal, with some modifications to the original design, was used until the terminal's closure on August 6, 2010 by AC Transit buses to drop off passengers and return to the East Bay as the Key System once did. The loop was completely demolished in 2010-11 as part of the project to replace the old Transbay Terminal with a new structure scheduled for completion in 2017.
• The south wall of the lower level (today's eastbound lanes) of the Yerba Buena Tunnel, connecting the two spans of the Bay Bridge, still contains the as-built "deadman holes", regularly spaced nooks into which railway workers could duck whenever a train came along.
• The eastern end of the San Francisco – Oakland Bay Bridge sits on landfill which was added to the northern edge of the causeway which carried the Key System railbed to the ferry piers.
• A stretch of road in Albany that was built with a wide median for a planned extension (never constructed) of the "G" Westbrae line is named Key Route Boulevard.
• The Claremont Hotel, built by a Key System affiliate company, The Realty Syndicate, survives as the Claremont Resort. It was the terminus of the "E" transbay line.
• The Realty Syndicate Building at 1440 Broadway was built in 1912 and housed "Borax" Smith and Frank C. Havens's Realty Syndicate that created the Key System. It is listed on the National Historic Register.
• The Key System's subsequent administrative headquarters building, built as the Security Bank and Trust Company Building in 1914, still exists at 1100 Broadway in downtown Oakland and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The building suffered some damage in the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake and is currently unoccupied.
• A building which today houses a restaurant at 41st Street and Piedmont Avenue in Oakland is the partial remnant of what was formerly a covered stop for trains on the C-line. (The tracks followed 40th Street, crossed Howe Street and curved through the parking lot behind Piedmont Avenue shops, then merged onto Piedmont Avenue at 41st Street and headed toward Pleasant Valley Avenue.) There are old photos of the Key System on the walls of the restaurant as well as a mural of Key System images on one of its outside walls.
• The old Key System Piedmont shops building at Bay Place and Harrison is now a Whole Foods Market retail store. This building was originally built in 1890 as the powerhouse and car barn of the Piedmont Cable Car Co. In the 1920s it was substantially remodeled and used as a Cadillac showroom which closed in the mid-1990s. The building sat vacant until 2003 when Whole Foods initiated a radical interior redesign while retaining and restoring much of the facade.
• The bus yards of today's AC Transit in Emeryville and Richmond were originally the bus yards of the Key System. The Richmond yard was also previously the site of the Northern Carhouse of the Key streetcar system.
• Several streetcars and bridge trains from the Key System are preserved at the Western Railway Museum at Rio Vista Junction in Solano County, as well as a Bridge Unit at the Orange Empire Railroad Museum in Perris, California and a streetcar at Seashore Trolley Museum in Kennebunk, Maine.
• One of the 0-4-0 Steam locomotives used to push the trains during power outages is on display at the Redwood Valley Railroad. It had a brief stint on the currently re-constructing Virginia and Truckee Railroad in Virginia City, Nevada. Here, the mountain grades proved too taxing for the little locomotive. It was later replaced by 2–8–0 Steam locomotive No. 29.