Re: Chama - A new pre-1924 view??

A little communications history associated with this photo for those interested in such...

Looking at the telegraph pole line, only three wires are extant.
At this date, These wires were all Morse wires and would have been:
No.1 railroad DS wire,
No. 8 WU way wire from WU Alamosa, and
No. 3, RR msg wire from Pueblo-Denver.

The No. 9 WU thru Morse wire from Pueblo to Durango hadn't been added yet.

I don't have pole head drawings for the pin position locationss of these wires at this early date.

This time period would also have been prior to WU changing wire designations to 3 digits, WU wire No. 8 later became No. 108.
"100" series wires were iron wires and "200" series wires were copper.

No's 1 and 3 were RR wires and kept their single digit identifications..

There never were any copper wires on the Alamosa-Durango-Silverton-Farmington lines, they were all No.8 BWG galvanized iron.

In the late 1930's, when telephone dispatching came to the D&RGW NG lines, WU thru wire 109 and RR wire No. 3 were transposed as a pair, and
became the DS telephone pair. WU thru teleprinter service was leased
from Mountain Bell into the Durango WU office

RR Wires No. 1 and WU way wire No. 108 remained as Morse wires until the end in 1969. RR wire No. 1 became a joint use Morse DS and message wire after the installation of the DS telephone system.

WU way wire No. 108 remained as a public accessible Western Union wire
at all open depots all the way to Silverton until the end. Wires 1 and 108 were
abandoned DG to SV in 1952 after snowslides took out the line



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 06/29/2015 03:31PM by Etrump.