Re: Great Link!

Greg Raven mentioned the possibility of a telegraph repeater on the Morse DS (No. 1 wire)wire at Durango...This is only a supposition at this point, because what was actually there has been lost to time....in the earlier days (circa 1920's) employee timetable information showed a
"No. 1 wire" to be on the pole lines all three ways out of Durango. East to Chama, north to Silverton, and south to Farmington. A Morse wire has to terminate either to terminal battery or a Repeater and terminal battery at the ends. It can't "branch" from the middle like a telephone line can. Some Morse wires "looped" up a branch and back again. We don't know if the No. 1 wire east from Durango was "repeatered" at Durango into
the No.1 wire from Silverton to Farmington, or perhaps the No. 1 wire went all the way through to Silverton from Alamosa and was repeatered to the No. 1 wire to Farmington. We may never know now. There weren't enough wires on either the Silverton line nor the Farmington line to carry No. 1 as a loop. There may not have been a repeater at Durango at all, and the three "No. 1"
wires may all have been completely separate entities with manual relay of whatever they were used for at Durango.
We have evidence that the No. 1 wire from Pueblo to Trinidad looped over to LaVeta from Walsenburg.
Pole head diagrams recovered show this (same wire number on two different pins on the line generally indicates a loop). Also, there is evidence that "west" No. 1 wire took battery from Alamosa W.U., looped from Alamosa over to LaVeta and back again. There is timetable info showing that it was cut in at Ft Garland and Fir as No. 1, and then cut in at LaVeta and Blanca as No. 01 before it went back thru Alamosa on its way to Santa Fe on the Chili line....It is doubtful that La Veta would have put terminal battery on either wire, but a loop into LaVeta ( a division point)from each side at a time when there were dispatchers at both Pueblo and Alamosa is certainly a possibility (probability). Lots of this detail has been lost forever, but we do know what wires were on which lines because of preserved polehead diagrams, so lots of it can be figured out from that.
Fascinating stuff to research. I wish now that I had dug more carefully into what records still existed at the time I worked down there in the Communications department...might have found out more.