A Biscuit update…
9 minute read
September 24, 2025, 9:08 AM
It’s been about three months since the last time that I gave you an update on former CARTA bus 3426, which Elyse and I call “Biscuit”, and considering that I had mentioned in the previous entry that she did not attend the show in New Jersey because she’s in another shop, it seems like it’s time to share a update on the state of her restoration.
After that initial adventure around Frederick, I started working on various restoration tasks while I had the bus in my possession, taking care of tires, wheels, and more work on removing that Planet Fitness wrap. I was spending a lot of time up in Frederick, simply driving Biscuit around doing whatever errands I needed to do, and continuing to verify her performance. I’m talking grocery shopping, Home Depot runs, you name it – the bus was my chariot in Frederick. I would go to the storage lot, get the bus out, put the HR-V in the parking space, and then I would go out in the bus. I also got lots of photos of Biscuit doing her thing, out and about in various places.
The first thing of importance that I took care of was tires. I took her over to Rice Tire in Frederick, where I finally got the tires that she had when she left CARTA replaced. Those tires were clearly at end of life. Take a look at the left front tire, and you will see that it was practically a racing slick. I tended to describe those old CARTA tires as, “Tread? What’s that?”
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Categories: Frederick, New Flyer D35HF, Virginia local news
The bus show…
5 minute read
September 17, 2025, 8:47 PM
On September 13, the Friends of the New Jersey Transportation Heritage Center held its annual bus show, where bus enthusiasts could show their buses, and other bus enthusiasts could enjoy them. The show took the same format as the previous year, and many of the participants from the previous year returned with their buses. All in all, it was a fun time, and I probably spent more time socializing than I did seeing buses. But that was fine, because I hadn’t seen many of those people in quite a while. My bus, former CARTA unit 3426, did not make an appearance, as it is currently in Middle River, Maryland (just north of Baltimore) at Johnson & Towers getting some engine work done after a few problems that we thought that we had rectified earlier came up again en route to a shop to complete some HVAC work. But that’s okay. I’d rather wait and take a fully healthy bus where we are confident about its prospects of completing the trip to a future event than to be worried about a breakdown the entire way up and back.
As far as photography went, this time around, I focused on what was different. So in most cases, if I had photographed the bus in 2024, I didn’t photograph it again. Not that I don’t love all of those buses, but I had gotten decent shots of them last year, and I didn’t feel the need to duplicate them unless significant changes had occurred. Thus while buses like former Bee-Line 687 and former SEPTA 5939 were there, I skipped them. I was also a bit surprised that DASH from Alexandria didn’t make a formal appearance this time around, either with a bus brought up from Alexandria, or bus 97, which now belongs to the group that puts on the show. Likewise, that school bus that seemed so out of place last year and didn’t get any love wasn’t there this time. The arrangement of the buses in the parking lot was also different, as some of the buses were parked facing northwest rather than southeast, which put the sun to their rear, which didn’t lend itself to great photos. So if you see a few dark photos, that’s why: far too much backlighting, and no good way to get around it.
Categories: New Jersey, Transit
The most ridiculous argument ever…
11 minute read
September 5, 2025, 5:26 PM
I was recently doing a search on my own Facebook posts to find something for the upcoming Life and Times photo set about my trip to Mobile, and I was struck by the fact that I had posted about one particular incident from 1994 three separate times:
July 3, 2019.
Categories: Church, Language, Stuarts Draft