Lee S. Whatley

Red Ladies Will Roll Again Soon...

I saw one of the Red "Von Dullen" cars rolling on a test run down St. Charles this weekend with "Desire" line signage. More info here . Looks like there will be enough restored red cars to fully man the Canal line by the end of the year. I wish I would have had my camera with me...

Maintenance Time!

Well the TDi is currently sitting at around 195,000 miles. Earlier this month I replaced the cracked windshield and last week I had the timing belt, serpentine belt, water pump, and front breaks replaced. At some point before it gets cold I will have to replace the glow plugs. It will be time for new tires and new shocks again soon too. The headliner is sagging, the paint is starting to chip off, the glovebox handle has broken off, and there is a nice big dent in the driver's side door thanks to a hit and run while I was running in the Crescent City Classic earlier this year, but the VW takes a licking and still keeps on ticking like clockwork. I'm hoping that I can keep the body together long enough to reach 300,000 miles, which given my current commuting routine will take about 4 years.

South.Lake.Union.Trolley

I was in Seattle last week and got to check out their new streetcar line: The South Lake Union line. This is technically their second streetcar line, but is currently the only one running, as the George Benson Waterfront line has been out of service since 2005 pending the construction of a new car barn. Regrettably I forgot my camera, which is really too bad because I happened to catch the crew washing one of the cars outside of the barn when I went by. Click below for more information about the line.

St. Charles Line Finally Complete

This weekend the streetcars finally started rolling down South Carrollton Avenue again for the first time in three years. This completes the saga of the St. Charles line's struggle to return after Hurricane Katrina. All that is left now is for the red Von Dullen cars to be rebuilt and to run on the Canal and Riverfront lines again. HERE is the story from nola.com.

Introducing the YardCam

Due to an attempted break-in (which, for those concerned, was unsuccessful (the alarm system did its job (HDANCN?!))) I finally got around to adding a webcam to the back yard. You can find it on the left side of the page right underneath the front yard "hood" cam. I'm not sure yet if I am going to keep it where it is, so the view might change slightly in the next few days.

Oh Snap!

Two streetcars collide on Canal St.
This happened near the Canal barn, so I imagine either one of the switches there malfunctioned or someone forgot to change one of the switches back to where it was supposed to be during normal operations.

Stuck in the Mud

So on Monday I managed to get the TDI stuck in the mud. This happened in the parking lot at the gym. The parking lot was full and I made the mistake of parking in rather soft spot in the grass. I knew it was a soft spot but I had parked there many times before and figured it was ok. I went for a run and by the time I came back I could see that the tires were already sunk in the ground. It took lots of pushing by three of the biggest dudes at the gym to get the car out. In the process the bottom portion of the bumper (the black part) came partially dislodged and split into two pieces. So Scott from the gym and myself went ahead and pulled it completely off and trashed it. Parts of the inside wheel well cover were also loose (they were attached to part of the bottom bumber and got pulled loose when the bumper came dislodged) and I ended up losing part of the driver's side one on the interstate on the way home.

Surprisingly, the car seems to still run and handle fine. The only thing noticable (besides the missing bumper section and inside wheel well cover) is that there is slightly more wind noise at higher speeds due to the missing wheel well cover. I have yet to determine if this is affecting gas mileage. Now that the bumper piece is gone the lowest point on the car body is the skid plate. So now when I bottom out (which happens pretty much daily, because my front suspension is pretty much shot beacause the roads in southeast Louisiana are pretty much crap) instead of the car making a plastic scraping sound now it makes a metal dinging sound,