It’s funny how things work. This week, one vehicle went into the shop, and the other came out. First, the HR-V went to the body shop to fix the damage after that run-in with the deer in Stuarts Draft, and I’m now in a rental car. That came a bit more quickly than I expected. Recall that I was on a trip when the accident happened, and after a quick assessment of the damage, we continued the trip to Roanoke, as the car was still drivable. I put almost 700 miles on the HR-V as part of that trip, and everything was just fine. Then I got home, parked the HR-V in its usual parking space, and all was well. Then when I started it the next day to go to work, the parking brake didn’t want to release, and I quickly learned that there was no way to manually release that electronic parking brake. The HR-V was clearly staying put. I ended up having to call out of work to take care of this, as the assessment was this: I could book a ride to work and back, but that would cost me a lot of money, and wouldn’t solve the problem of the car’s not wanting to start. Taking the day off meant that I could go down to Enterprise and get a rental car. And at that time of day on a Saturday, the only Enterprise location that was open was at National Airport. Fortunately, my friend Aaron Stone happened to be in town that day, so he was able to give me a ride to the airport. The plan was to deal with the rental car, and then get AAA to tow the HR-V to the body shop later on. However, once Aaron came, I decided to fire up the HR-V again and see what would happen. Of course the parking brake released then. So rather than get a tow, the HR-V went to CRG under its own power, and then I put the key in their drop box. Good – that saved me a lot of hassle, though I would have preferred to go to work.
I stopped by CRG the following Thursday to make sure that everything was good with the repair and to retrieve a few items from the car that I had forgotten. That was an amusing visit. This is the new HR-V’s third visit to CRG for body work, and we all got a laugh when one of them joked that I should get a punch card. I remarked, with a laugh, “Four body repairs and the fifth one is free, right?” I mean, it’s not like I’m deliberately bashing it up. One time, I got rear-ended. Another time, I inadvertently backed into a fence post and put a nice little scratch in it (I paid cash for that one, since that was minor, and very obviously my fault). And now the deer.
Meanwhile, after we chatted for a bit (they’re really lovely people over there), when I went out to the lot to go retrieve the forgotten items, I couldn’t find my car. One of the guys came out and showed me where it was. As it turned out, I had walked right by it without even realizing it because I didn’t recognize it. The shop had already done their damage assessment, and had removed all of the damaged pieces from the car. I soon realized that I missed it because I was looking for this face, and those pieces were missing.
Here’s what the HR-V looked like when I saw it:
Yep – no face. I’m pretty sure that I walked right up to my car, looked at it, and thought that my car wasn’t this badly damaged, and kept on walking. The joke was on me for that one, I suppose. Though I admit that it’s kind of cool to see the car with no face, even if just for a moment. The good news, though, is that I’ll be back in the HR-V in a couple of weeks, and it will be good as new again with a new face, looking just like it always does.
In the meantime, I have a Mazda CX-5, which is more or less the Mazda equivalent of the HR-V. And that car quickly reminded me of everything that I like about my car, because this car isn’t it. It’s got a lot of things that just weren’t implemented as well as on my real car, and those things annoy me. I just keep having to remind myself that it’s only for a couple of weeks.
Meanwhile, the good news is that my bus, a 1996 New Flyer D35HF, i.e. former CARTA bus 3426, also known as “Biscuit”, recently got out of the shop, and is running pretty well. Recall the story with this bus. We initially picked it up in October 2023, and the transmission quickly decided that it was done, so it went into the shop in South Carolina, i.e. General Diesel. It had a whole bunch of work done to make it roadworthy, and we went back down to retrieve it in September 2024. During that retrieval, the oil pump decided that it was done. So Biscuit went back into the shop for a new oil pump. Then when that was done, I used most of my vacation week to make another trip to Charleston, and this time, a brake chamber seized up on me, which ended that retrieval attempt, since the brake chamber also damaged a transmission cable, which they needed to order. Once that was done, rather than go back down to Charleston for another attempt to drive her to her new home, I opted to have it brought up on a flatbed instead, figuring that when you add up the cost of travel, lodging, meals, fuel, and the value of my time, it made more sense to just have it trucked in, which also guaranteed that it would make it. That happened in January, and Biscuit was at long last at her new home in Frederick, i.e. I was finally getting some use out of the parking spot that I had been paying for since September.
With Biscuit now up in Maryland, and with easy access to her, we came up a few times to try to start her (she didn’t want to start up when we got her off of the truck until she got a jump, and that persisted afterward), and we also researched shops to take care of the remaining mechanical issues. We ended up going with a place called J&M Truck Repair, which is less than a mile from where I keep her. We listed off the symptoms and sent them all of the documentation from General Diesel, and she went into the shop once again. As it would work out, I got very lucky this time. We had a problem with an oil leak and exhaust coming out of places where it shouldn’t, and it turned out that it was just a missing part on the engine, and cost me a relatively small amount. I had been bracing for a very big number, thinking that the bus would need a full engine rebuild, but fortunately, it wasn’t that much, which was fine with me. Turned out that Biscuit’s engine was good, even if everything around it had been falling apart.
We also took care of some other “punch list” items while she was in the shop, getting the battery tray to slide in better, and also replacing the overhead mirror. The overhead mirror was one instance where I had to pit historical accuracy against safety and convenience. The factory overhead mirror was long, narrow, and flat, as seen in this photo. From my experience as a bus operator, I hated those things, because their small size meant that there was very little tolerance for misalignment, or else you couldn’t see what you needed to see. Usually, when I would encounter this kind of mirror on an Orion V or a Neoplan, I would have to cock it to one side in order to actually see what I needed to see, but on this model, there is structure right above the overhead mirror that prevented me from turning it the way that I needed. Fortunately, Elyse found a solution, pulling the overhead mirror off of a former WMATA unit, bus 6023, after it had been retired from service and was at a junkyard in PG County. Those buses had larger overhead mirrors that were convex, and I much preferred that style of mirror because it was so much easier to see both in and around the bus. So we had J&M put it on for us. It was somewhat weird to think that I had now used that same overhead mirror on two different buses many years apart, but the bigger overhead mirror looks like it belongs, and I’m glad that it’s now on the bus rather than sitting in my living room.
Getting the bus out of the shop, it was time to take it for something of a shakedown cruise, to verify that everything was good. I had gotten some guidance from Trevor Logan on how to do acceptance testing, and generally followed his advice. He recommended that for acceptance testing, we should do 30 minutes’ driving around town, go five miles down the highway going 55 mph, then go another five miles fully opened up, and then go 65 mph for about 30 miles down the highway. If it performs well with no warning lights or anything, then the bus is accepted, and it’s ready to have some fun. Now, the shop told us right out of the gate that there would be some warning lights, but they were related to the fire suppression system, i.e. a non-mission-critical function that we could deal with another time.
Here’s the bus after the shop brought her out for us:
As soon as she came out, I did a quick pre-trip inspection, and we were ready to go, with a party of three: me, and two others who wanted to come along for the ride. I started out going around the block past the storage facility, and then went out of the industrial park in search of fuel. We originally stopped at Sheetz to fuel her, but then realized that we couldn’t find the allen wrench that General Diesel had given us to undo CARTA’s quick-fuel port. I suspect that it had inadvertently gotten cleaned up during its time in the shop, and besides, it’s not like I had to pay for that tool, so I wasn’t mad. A quick stop at AutoZone rectified that issue, and we fueled up at a Southern States gas station just down the street.
With fueling taken care of, we decided to use the Frederick Transit garage as a navigation point. I put it in Google, and we went. However, what we didn’t know at the time was that this was the day of the Frederick Pride parade, and our route was to take us right through downtown, where there were a lot of parade-related street closures. I was going down East Street, and saw a traffic backup as far as the eye could see. I didn’t want to spend the entire time sitting in traffic, so after I evaluated the situation, I saw that I had enough space to make a U-turn, plus clear traffic, so I busted a big U-turn right in the middle of East Street and headed back the other way, towards Buckeystown Pike. From there, I ended up going on the freeway for a few miles, so I used that as my 55 mph testing, going north towards Rosemont Avenue. We got off on the exit for Rosemont, and went to the Frederick Transit facility:
Biscuit, sitting outside of the Frederick Transit facility.
While we do have friends that work at Frederick Transit, they were not there, so we just stopped for a few photos on the street and then kept it moving. Though we did wave hello to various Frederick Transit operators that we saw on the road over the course of the day, even if we weren’t a Frederick bus ourselves. You could tell that some of them were surprised to see a vintage bus on the road.
Once we were done with our impromptu photo session, we had to determine where we wanted to go. We all needed to make a Walmart run, and Walmart closed at 11, so that drove our plans. We had initially thought about going to Hagerstown, but then we settled on Waynesboro, Pennsylvania. However, after we saw that Google wanted to route us right through the street closures again, we had second thoughts, and considering where we were in relation to everything, we chose the Walmart on Monocacy Boulevard in Frederick instead. For the first day out, I felt like that was probably a better move anyway, since I was still getting used to the way that the bus handled, plus it was getting later in the day. Neither Hagerstown nor Waynesboro were going anywhere, and Biscuit was clearly running well, so we could do that another time.
Arriving at Walmart, I parked her in the back of the lot, against a long parking island:
Biscuit is parked at Walmart, with the wheels pointed at the curb.
Here’s the front of the bus with the new overhead mirror installed. It looks like it was always there, which is a good thing.
And by the way, it is not fun loading a cart full of groceries onto a high-floor bus, but we managed. From there, we started making our way back towards the storage facility, in order to put Biscuit back in her spot. From the Walmart, it was a straight shot down Monocacy Boulevard, which then became New Design Road. During this part of our day, it started to rain. The wipers are powered by air, which is typical for buses of this period, and it took them a long time to come to life. I suspect that they had not been operated in a very long time, so it was just a matter of building air pressure in the areas where it needed to build, because after about a minute or so, they were moving just fine, behaving the way that air-powered wipers ought to behave, though we clearly needed new blades. I also realized how dirty the front windshield was, so that would need a good cleaning.
We also recognized during this part of the ride that the headlights were a bit lacking. They still met the legal requirements for headlights, so it’s not like the headlights didn’t work or were otherwise unsafe, but we were left feeling like we wanted better. We were already planning to replace the headlights with Dialight LED units, so that will take care of that, but I suspect that we’re going to want to address that sooner rather than later.
And then, before you knew it, we were back at the industrial park. We first stopped at a nearby Royal Farms to top off the tank:
Biscuit fuels up at RoFo.
And then it was a short drive back to the storage lot:
Biscuit is back home, safe and sound.
Let me tell you that I was feeling on top of the world after this day’s adventure. Biscuit 2.0, i.e. former CARTA bus 3426, performed beautifully. Compare to the first time that Elyse laid eyes on it back in April 2023, when the bus museum adopted her fleetmate, 3424. At that time, 3426 was still in active revenue service. Elyse saw it leave the lot for service, and then saw it putter back in not long after, clearly not able to do what was being asked of it. Now, she’s healthy again. We had zero issues the entire day. Just running all over town, and roping that wheel at every turn. Her performance even improved throughout the day, as we continued the break-in of the new transmission, as we put it through all of its various gears, and the transmission’s computer learned how to shift this bus. The shifting was somewhat rough when we were in South Carolina, as well as early on in this outing, but it got a lot smoother as we kept running it, as the transmission’s computer learned how to work with this equipment. Overall, it was a great feeling, knowing that all of my efforts are paying off.
Of course, the restoration project is not done by any means. Getting her in good mechanical shape was just the first phase, but getting her to the point of being able to move under her own power again was first and foremost. There’s still a big laundry list of things that we need to do for the bus, including getting all new tires (she’s currently wearing her final CARTA tires, which are very well-loved), replacing the windshield wipers, repairing the air conditioning system, servicing the wheelchair lift, giving the interior and exterior a thorough cleaning including finally removing the rest of that godawful Planet Fitness ad wrap (and the Church’s Chicken wrap underneath it), figuring out how to secure a large panel in the back of the bus, reupholstering the seats, replacing the driver’s seat, replacing the cover on the steering column, new headlights, replacing a number of other miscellaneous lights, and probably a whole bunch of other things that we will discover as the restoration progresses. Then I also still have to learn how to program the signs, since Elyse did the current sign program, and I want to add my own things to it (i.e. I want to put some of my own goofy messages on it).
Then I suspect that the next time that we visit Biscuit will be after the HR-V is out of the body shop in a couple of weeks, because I’m planning to do a little double-header: two shops at the same time, as the HR-V goes to the Honda dealer for routine maintenance, while Biscuit goes to the tire shop for new tires. That will require some planning to pull off properly, but I believe that it’s doable. The only question is which place we end up physically waiting at.