How I spent my Thanksgiving…
9 minute read
November 29, 2025, 7:49 PM
This year, I spent my Thanksgiving on the road, volunteering my time and money for Commonwealth Coach & Trolley, a Roanoke-based museum that owns a collection of vintage vehicles, largely transit buses. Along with Elyse, I serve on the museum’s board of directors. On this particular occasion, I was transporting a recent acquisition down to its permanent home in Roanoke. This was a former WMATA unit, bus 6181, a 2006 New Flyer D40LFR, which Metro donated to the museum in February of this year. After the museum received the bus (I had no involvement in the donation process), I helped coordinate and fund a repair on a leaking coolant pipe, and I also took care of titling and registration. Once I got the bus registered, I took it on a quick test drive, running it up Route 1 from the parking lot in College Park where the museum had been keeping it up to Laurel, just to make sure that I was confident in its performance:
I pulled into a bus stop on the side of Route 1 in order to adjust a mirror. I was pleased to see that I was just as proficient as ever at servicing a bus stop, even though it’s been more than nine years since I operated buses regularly.
Continue reading…Categories: Commonwealth Coach & Trolley, Roanoke, Stuarts Draft, Travel, WMATA
And now she’s in Mobile…
5 minute read
March 10, 2025, 9:26 AM
This is one of those subjects where you just have to let out a big sigh. I never really thought that I would see the day, but the SS United States, also known as the “Big U”, left Philadelphia under tow by the Vinik No. 6 and was taken down the east coast, around the tip of Florida, and up the Gulf of Mexico to Mobile, Alabama, where she is to be stripped of everything that isn’t metal, and then sunk to become the world’s largest artificial reef and be something of a diving tourist attraction for her new owners, Okaloosa County, Florida, while at least one of her funnels as well as her mast will be preserved to become part of a museum about the ship on land nearby. I feel like this is something that nobody really wanted to see happen to the Big U, but after more than 28 years spent sitting at Pier 82 in Philadelphia, she had overstayed her welcome, and the owners of the pier went to court to have her evicted. And at that point, with her losing her longtime berth, and no prospects for a rehabilitation on the horizon, it came down to whether it was better to scrap her or to sink her. Okaloosa County, Florida stepped up and she was to be sunk.
And of course, like everything with the United States, even her departure was long and drawn out. She was originally supposed to leave Philadelphia to begin her preparations for sinking on November 15, 2024, and Elyse and I had planned to see her off, booking a room at the Hampton Inn in Pennsville, New Jersey in order to watch her go underneath the Delaware Memorial Bridge. Then that date was scrubbed, so I cancelled the reservation. Then another date was announced that I couldn’t make, and that date came and went, with the Big U’s remaining at her longtime pier across the street from IKEA. She finally left Philadelphia on February 19 – a day that I had previous commitments that precluded our going. However, we did follow the Vinik No. 6 on MarineTraffic as she passed the Delaware Memorial Bridge that evening, and then cleared Cape May to enter the open ocean. I also enjoyed seeing all of the various photo updates showing the ship going down the Delaware, and then out at sea for the first time since the nineties. Then I got a certain feeling of sadness when she arrived in Mobile, because that meant that it was time for her preparation for her date with the bottom of the ocean to commence.
Categories: Commonwealth Coach & Trolley, Ships
A very transit-themed weekend…
14 minute read
April 11, 2024, 11:57 PM
On March 28 and 29, I had two very distinct transit-themed adventures. One day was a bus adventure, and the other was rail-related.
The bus adventure came first, on Thursday, March 28. That one has some background to it. First of all, every year for the past several years, I have had what I call a “tax party” with my friend Matthew, where we get together and we take care of our various taxes. Generally speaking, we go somewhere to eat, and then I sit down with the computer and do my own taxes, I do Matthew’s taxes, and I do Elyse’s taxes. This year, the tax party was done in two stages, as Matthew had to cancel at the last minute due to something unforeseen coming up, so I did the taxes for Elyse and me on the original date back in February (where I owed a ton of money because of my photography earnings), and then rescheduled with Matthew for a later date, impressing on him that he really shouldn’t postpone again, since the due date for taxes is a hard date, and you really don’t want to be a last-minute filer if you can avoid it. So we planned the date, and that was that. Now Matthew is also a bit of a transit enthusiast, and has pursued some opportunities in the transit field, but has always gotten cold feet when it came to the thought of actually operating a bus.
Now, along with Elyse, I am also on the board of directors for Commonwealth Coach & Trolley, which is a bus museum based in Roanoke, Virginia. Many of us on the board are in the DC area, and some of our vehicles do stay up in the DC area for various reasons. So I pitched the idea to have a small outreach event, taking a bus out for a spin and going to visit Matthew in that. So Elyse and I went down to where the bus was kept, parked the HR-V, and took out the bus. The bus that we had was former Fairfax Connector bus 7754, a 1991 Orion I, which we tend to call MATT, which stands for “Mobile Accessible Travel Training”. As I understand it, this bus originally operated as a regular Fairfax bus, and then was converted to a training vehicle to help older adults and people with disabilities learn to use public transit. I’m not exactly sure how it all worked, but it was fitted with some extra doodads like TV monitors, and has a desk with a swivel seat in the back of it, while the area forward of the rear door has updated seats.
Categories: Alexandria, Commonwealth Coach & Trolley, Driving, Fairfax County, Loudoun County, Matthew, Washington DC, WMATA