Re: Telegraph wires

jfengineer...

Most interesting...

I've learned more since my original post about the South Park line.

Interesting about the insulators...they are priceless arifacts, little affected by laying around for 70 or 80 years after line abandonments.

Your statement:

"The others are much newer ( 1910-1918), the No.16 being a "Toll" style for use on old telephone toll lines - somewhat odd for a RR application."

Perhaps Linn Moedinger's last photo that shows the drop-type transposition bracket on the top crossarm is a clue as to what the No. 16 "Toll" style insulators that you found were used for.

As far as I know the C&S never used telephone for dispatching on the South Park line, so I surmise there may have been a telephone pair added on the end pins of the top crossarm on that line at a late date perhaps after 1910 or so, for some other reason, perhaps to serve,
communities along the route.

It would certainly have been easier to string a telephone pair on an existing pole line through the area rather than construct an entire new line...and the Western Union may have leased the pole & crossarm space to some other entity to do so.

Maybe we will never know, but who knows what will eventually turn up.

I'll be on the lookout for more photos that might show transpositions on the top crossarm end pair of that line. If it was for basic voice frequency telephone use, the "rolls" or j-bracket transpositions would only occur many spans apart, so finding photos showing same may be difficult or impossible.

Interesting, nonetheless....

Thank You for your post!