Re: Telegraph wires

Thank you Hank...

I've only recently begun to work on the telegraph wires that
ran over the Marshall pass line west of Salida and what was on the Grand Jct-Montrose portion of the old original main D&RG line, plus the Ouray branch. I don't have access to all the neat stuff the CRRM has put away any more, so it takes some time to figure things out..Your help is very much appreciated.

From what you tell me then, we can be pretty sure that the Western Union wire 102 (the "100" series meant that it was a galvanized iron wire) ran from Grand Jct Western Union down through Delta, Montrose, Ridgway, then looped to Ouray (both the RR office "OU" and the WU office "AY" maybe??) thence over Dallas Divide to Vance Jct, where it looped into Telluride, then back to Vance Jct, and on over the rest of the RGS to Durango to terminal Battery there. 102 may have been carried as a "thru wire" (in switchboards at intermediate offices, but not cut in with instruments assigned to it) from WU Grand Jct to Montrose, then worked as a "way wire" (a wire that is equipped with instruments at all offices along the route) beyond Montrose towards Durango.

It makes sense, and that is the way Western Union likely would have done it. The other RGS wire was probably "No 1" as it was the only
other wire on the RGS system.

Montrose may not have had as large a WU office as I originally envsioned it.

There was at least one Western Union wire that came over
Marshall Pass from Salida and it probably went through Montrose to WU Grand Jct as well for terminal battery. I've yet to find out what wires looped up the Hotchkiss-Paonia branch, one of the WU wires may have gone up there as a loop from the main line as well. Also looking
at the Crested Butte branch...Likely a WU wire looped up there along
with a RR message wire, due to the heavy coal business.

This stuff fascinates me no end. I still kick myself for not researching more of this in the Grand Jct/Montrose area when I was working for the D&RGW out of Grand Jct....Likely a lot of the info I need now was available there at that time, but I wasn't as interested in the history of it all then as I am now.

I've got the Pueblo-Salida and Pueblo-Walsenburg-LaVeta-Alamosa lines pretty well documented now, and the line that went from Alamosa to Durango as well, plus the Silverton, Creede, Farmington and Santa-Fe branches. Got a big working drawing that shows the wire numbers, what looped to where, and all the office calls along each route. On the narrow gauge routes, most of those wires survived from the time they were initially strung until the pole lines were abandoned.

I'll keep digging at it and git-'er-done sometime....