Re: Telegraph

John...

In Telegraph parlance, a "way wire" was a wire that was "cut in" at every or nearly every office along a given line and which was equipped with instruments (relay & key) in each office.

This was in contrast to a "thru wire" which typically went over a division
and was brought into some strategic stations switchboards for testing and patching, but was not "cut in" there and normally had no instruments assigned to it.

Thru wires in The Western Union plant usually ran between WU relay offices, for example, Denver to Pueblo, Pueblo to Alamosa, Alamosa to Durango, etc.

The wires 3 and 9 between Alamosa and Durango were overhauled in the late 1930's and equipped for normal Dispatcher's telephone service (not telegraphones) by bridging all the twisted Western Union splices with smaller copper wire and soldering the joints to reduce conductor resistance losses, and also "transposing" or alternating crossarm pin positions betweent the two wires at mathematically calculated intervals (for below 3 kHz voice service, about three twists per mile) so as to reduce inductive and capacitive interaction between the telephone pair and adjacent wires on the line. This was accomplished by using "J" brackets on the transposition poles which allowed one wire of the pair to drop below the other and come up on the alternate pin position on the next pole crossarm...then after a few spans, this was repeated. 30 poles per mile, voice transposition would maybe swap pin positions of the two wires being paired every ten poles or so. This improved telephone voice transmission and helped keep the telephone circuit quieter.

I got this info about the line modifications from an old T&T maintainer named Axel Stor whom I worked with while in the Comm. Dept of the D&RGW...he was on the WU linegang in the 30's as a young man and personally did some of this work.

Durango WU went to a leased Mountain Bell teleprinter circuit for WU "thru" service after the thru Morse wire was taken for RR DS phone service.

The Durango WU office was on the next street east from Main, up the hill
and about 2 blocks north of the RR Depot, on the west side of the street.
The office was still open in 1963, don't know when it closed, probably when WU gave up all over the country.