PCCs on Kingston Road

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Apparently, when we went into this pandemic lockdown, some people thought that they could use the time at home to get creative. I don't know these people, and so I don't know what the hell they were thinking when they thought this. The blog here has languished as I spend my commentary energies on Facebook and Twitter -- that is, when I'm not doomscrolling.

Writing is getting done, however. I'm working on a short story that sits within the universe I'm creating with The Sun Runners and The Cloud Riders, and I continue to work on Transit Toronto. I have submitted grant applications with the Ontario Arts Council which, while they may be long shots, are still better than no shots at all.

I am slowly but steadily working through Richard Glaze's photo collection, and have scanned over 800 photographs, and placed 500 of them on the website. I've also been in touch with transit fans and historians in Ohio and at the Seashore Trolley Museum and shipped off over a thousand slides of American transit operations from the 1950s. The Cincinnati Transit Historical Association is already putting together a presentation on Glaze's material. I haven't been in touch with Richard directly, but his friends have told me that Richard is delighted that his collection is getting out there and being shared and enjoyed.

And recently, I've taken a crack at some of Richard's 16mm film collection. I've opened a box and inventoried about 14100 feet of film (in 141 100-foot reels -- these are four inches in diameter). Digitizing all of this is going to be prohibitively expensive, so I'm considering a Kickstarter to try and raise funds. In the meantime, I'm testing how well the digitization can be, finding a local place to scan a handful of reels in HD. We'll do another test of some other reels to see what they look like in 4K.

The film reels are silent, of course, but they are all of transit operations from the late 1960s into the late 1970s, so I gathered what I could, applied some music from YouTube's Audio Library, and the above is the first of Richard Glaze's movies brought to life. I hope you like it. I certainly enjoyed putting it together.

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