A much happier and healthier Biscuit…
7 minute read
January 26, 2026, 1:44 PM
At long last, my bus, former CARTA 3426, is out of the shop, as she still needed a good bit of mechanical work. She got out of the shop on January 15, and is running quite well, with no warning lights or any other indications. No longer do we fire her up and pray that she makes it. Now, one new countershaft later, among other things, we have some level of confidence that she is going to make it, as I believe that we’ve tackled all of the maintenance issues that CARTA didn’t. If it tells you how far things have come, when Elyse and the rest of the crew from the bus museum went down in April 2023 to pick up 3424 for the museum’s fleet, they saw 3426, then still on the active roster, go out for revenue service. It left, and then came limping back about a half an hour later, defeated. Then when we picked 3426 up after purchasing her in October 2023, she was leaning over pretty hard, and then the transmission quit on us about 17 miles into our journey.
When we picked up the bus from Johnson & Towers, one thing that we noticed right off of the bat, though, was that she had a little bit of difficulty shifting between first and second gear, in that it would take a couple of tries before the shift happened successfully. Everything else was fine. This was not expected, but it’s also something that might resolve itself. The idea is that the way that the various systems’ computers work is that they have to learn how to run with each other, so there is something of a break-in period as everything adjusts. We brought the shifting issue to the shop’s attention, and after some discussion, we decided to run with it and see if the learning curve didn’t address it, as both the engine and the transmission had work done on them, and thus they had to figure out how to work with each other all over again.
The shakedown test was a logical one: the ride back to Frederick from Baltimore. For that, we took the bus through the city, taking quite a number of different Baltimore city streets and then going out into the suburbs before hitting the freeway. That fit the pattern for bus acceptance testing that we had been given, i.e. start out with city streets, and then work your way up to full speed on the highway. The ride through Baltimore was fairly stressful for me, mainly because I didn’t know exactly where I was going, as I am not as familiar with Baltimore as I would like to be, and now here I was driving a big bus through streets that I didn’t know very well. But I managed, even taking my bus through a construction zone on Route 40 that, unbeknownst to me at the time, MTA Maryland routes its buses around because it’s so narrow. But I handled it like a champ. We also discovered that 3426 had good heat, which had heretofore gone untested, as the original pickup was in early October, which is still quite warm in Charleston, and then she had only been operated in warmer months since coming to Maryland just because of how things worked out.
Continue reading…Categories: Baltimore, Baltimore County, Frederick, Frederick County, New Flyer D35HF, Rockville
A weekend trip to the shore…
17 minute read
January 16, 2026, 10:29 PM
I do love taking weekend outings to places. This time, I did a little solo trip to Ocean City, Maryland from January 8-10. I prefer going to beach areas during either the off-season or the “shoulder season”, and I had a pretty good time, as I get all of the scenery with only a fraction of the people and traffic getting in my way. It worked out well, as I explored a bit and got photos of things that I had not gotten before.
Though the thing that stuck out most for me about this trip was probably the way that the planning went. I knew that this was going to be a solo outing from the outset, since Elyse was otherwise committed and wouldn’t be able to join me. So that shifted the planning a bit, as I tend to focus on things that I would want to do that Elyse would have no interest in or would otherwise complain about when I do solo trips. And Elyse doesn’t like going to beach towns during the off-season because she claims that there’s not enough to do there and gets bored. But while Ocean City worked out quite well, I had tossed arond a lot of ideas for potential destinations before settling on Ocean City. Part of me wanted to do a very ambitious weekend trip, and part of me wanted to do something a little more conservative. I considered Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Atlantic City, Asbury Park, New York City, Buffalo, Cleveland, Raleigh, and the North Carolina Outer Banks. I even considered places in Canada, with Windsor and Toronto as possible destinations (and all of this travel would have been done as a road trip, mind you). I also considered some routings where the journey was the real trip, and the “destinations” were just stopovers. Most notably, I had considered a plan that would have been similar to my April 2024 trip to New Jersey, where I would have gone into New Jersey via the Delaware Memorial Bridge and then across South Jersey to Egg Harbor Township, stayed the night, and then taken the Cape May-Lewes Ferry across to the Delmarva Peninsula, and ending up in Ocean City at the end of the second day. Then on the last day, I would have taken Delaware Route 1 from start to finish, going from the Maryland line up to Newark, and then back home via I-95. The goal of that last day would have been to explore “slower lower Delaware”, going through Dover, and visiting all three counties in Delaware: Sussex, Kent, and New Castle. I’ve previously been to Sussex and New Castle, but never Kent. That would have been an interesting trip profile, going as far north as Wilmington in order to go well to the south of my own house, and also never touching the Bay Bridge. Though all the same, I would have had fun doing it.
Categories: Ocean City, Travel
The cafeteria traffic light…
6 minute read
January 10, 2026, 12:46 AM
Recently, I was thinking about the cafeteria in elementary school. No particular reason why, but seeing as I have a lot of time for thinking when I’m on the train, it just sort of popped into my mind.
When I attended Bonnie Grimes Elementary School from 1987 to 1992, we had one of those traffic signal-style noise monitors in the cafeteria. It was about the size of a real traffic signal, and shaped similarly to one. It was freestanding, being attached to a fairly simple wooden base. It was one of those things that would measure the ambient noise level in the room, and meeting different thresholds that were set in the device would change the aspect, i.e. below a certain level activated the green light, a noise level between a lower and upper threshold activated the yellow light, and above the upper threshold activated the red light and sounded an alarm. I believe that the product name was “Buddy Buzzer” (as told to us by my first grade teacher), though I could find scant reference to the product online, because presumably, the Buddy Buzzer product has been discontinued for decades at this point, and the manufacturer may very well be long out of business.
Interestingly, Grimes didn’t use the traffic light consistently through my five years there. They used it early on when I was in first grade, as it was one of the many new toys that the school got to play with that came when outfitting a brand new school building. Then after what felt like a relatively brief run, they stopped using it, and then it sat unplugged in a corner for the remainder of that year. It saw no use during my second and third grade years, languishing in a corner in the cafeteria, looking all forlorn. Then in December of my fourth grade year, they dusted it off and put it back in service, using it in the cafeteria for the remainder of the year. Then for fifth grade, it was back in the corner. I don’t know what they did with it after that, and I sort of wonder if it’s still knocking around there in a back room somewhere, or if they finally pitched that thing.
Categories: Elementary school