What is the purpose of those wires? To carry the power for the signals and switches?
You don’t point to a picture so I can only assume you are referring to those normally found along railiroad rights of way, especially in years past. Most of them carried telephone, telegraph, and signal circuits. A railroad had its own communicaitons network from one end of the railroad to the other plus branches so there were local lines, several dispatcher lines, trackside phones, division lines, and corporate lines plus others including spares for both telephone and telegraph. Then there were sgnal circuits which were based on the equipment and manufacturer or system used, et al.
In very rough terms:
1850-1900: Communications only, first telegraph, then telegraph and telephone
1900-1920: Addition of simple signal circuits to the communications circuits. These signal circuits are signal-to-signal and convey information to a given block from the adjoining blocks only. There aren’t any long-haul signal circuits. Almost all signals were battery powered due to lack of widespread availability of commercial power.
1920-1940: In some instances, power lines are added (usually D.C.) to power wayside signal installations. But many remain battery only.
1940-1960: Power lines are broadly installed to the pole lines, both D.C. and A.C., and the battery-only wayside signal installations decline rapidly in prevalence. CTC code lines are added to many pole lines, on lines where CTC is installed.
1960-1970: Communications lines rapidly disappear as commercial telephone and railroad microwave systems replace the pole line telephone circuits.
1970-1980: Code lines rapidly disappear as railroads convert to microwave, HD Linker, and Bellco circuits for transmitting code information. D.C. power circuits disappear quickly as A.C. utility drops become prevalent.
1980-2000: Signal circuits rapidly disappear as railroads convert to electrocode (which is in the rail) or HD Linker.
2000-present: More and more, all that remains is power only, and usually now it is new A.C. on a new pole line, not the old pole line.
Much of what is still out there today on the old pole lines is dead. The wires remain but the volts are gone. Most of these are iron wires or iron-core wires, and thus of meager value for scrap whether by railroad forces or thieves. Usually the power lines were copper, and those power lines that remain in service are usually hot.
This is the typical pattern on the preponderance of U.S. railways. Others might add the exotic and e
Thanks guys…
Another use of the poles was to carry quarter, half, three-quarter, and mile markers. The SLSF had forty poles to the mile, and every tenth one was marked. (If you were checking your speed, and the train was creeping along, you did not have to wait forever to get to the next marker; if it took you one minute to get from one pole to the next, you knew that you were covering a mile and a half every hour.) The UP and other roads still have posts every quarter mile, but they serve no other purpose.
RWM, thanks for the brief history. It is somewhat sad to see the abandoned wires along a right of way, but we know that it is not worth anybody’s time to recover them.
Johnny
At least in Canada, sometimes there were also outside external users of wire pairs. For example in Golden, in the province of British Columbia, radio feeds from two radio stations were carried over separate lines to local transmitters in that town. I have no idea what the commercial arrangements were between the railway and the radio stations. Now of course satellites or fibre-optic cables will have taken over that function.
As an aside, I will mention that we photographers were all too often frustrated by the pole lines. It always seemed the wires or poles were in the way of that perfect shot. Now of course they are mostly vanished, and thankfully so. The one exception is when we try to recreate period images with steam locomotives and vintage automobiles. To me the missing telegraph line plainly reveals the inherent falsity of the resulting picture.
John
Left out the pairs that were dedicated Western Union.
DON’T ASSUME ALL THOSE LINES ARE DEAD…Went through a headache exercise last year on RWM’s old employer where a stupid kid touched a low hanging wire in hill country on purpose. He thought the line was dead and was going to fake electrocution to scare/spoof other kids following. The 440 Volt line was very much still live. (It ain’t the volts that kill you, it’s them pesky AMPs! - stupid kid lived with some very bad burns as did two other kids trying to help the idiot with his hands frozen to the wires)
Pole counts went anywhere from 30-50 per mile with 35-40 being common. Pole count per mile were directly related to how many gains on the poles were occupied with crossarms and wires. Some of us old dinosaurs even remember when portable phones meant carrying around a canvas bag with two wire clips, a battery and a handset and clipping onto copper message phone lines.
I’m probably one of the few guys in the railfan/railroad sense that took a liking to poles and lines. It’s probably a little uncanny how I can detect a railroad in pictures or otherwise by looking at the poles and lines. I’m probably biased but I always thought that the MILW and IC/ICG had the best-looking poles and lines followed closely by both GN and NP. RI’s weren’t bad but CNW’s were just horrible (so were their switchstands).
My father was a district lineman for the NP/BN from 1947-1990. He worked with all the different line systems from open wire through cable to microwave. He retired as the BN was starting to install fiber optics. He mainly worked the area from Seattle to Tacoma including the Stampede Pass line. As a teenager he took me by motorcar to Lester during a snowstorm. It was pretty impressive how he found the problem in the middle of the storm.
One of the problems, and reasons so many lines still exist, is because over time schematics, etc. were lost. Along the EL for instance, the only way they could find out what a particular piece of wire was for was to wait for a failure of a signal or communications line when wires were taken down by trees, winds, or thieves stealing copper and insulators! By removing the unchartered circuit they relearned the wires’ function until the whole system could be redesigned. Even when CR took down the semaphores and replaced them with lights, the old wires remain in place lest they be without circuits!
I didnt like them back in the 70’s when taking photos. Now, I miss them.
Looking back at old photos, a full rack of line wires (was) is a pretty neat compliment to a photo.
ed
The lineside poles are also a source of collectibles, like plates, signs, and insulators. Search the web for “collectible insulators” and you can find some that are worth more than $15,000.
In the interest of preserving some of that oral history - Do you have any stories, insights, day-to-day routine, technology, training, union representation, information, likes/ dislikes, history, experiences, incidents, etc. that you could share with us ?
- PDN.
Here’s a question regarding poles and pole lines: I’ve noticed that, in many cases anyway, that the poles carrying the line would occasionally have two poles, side by side with the crossarms that carry the wire doubled as well. I asked a signal maintainer friend of mine on the ICG’s Iowa Division (now deceased) what these poles were. He said that they were “storm” poles although I never really got a good explanation of their use or purpose. I always thought they were for line tension but am not sure. Can anyone shed some light on this?
Having seen numerous power pole lines go down like dominoes during Ice Storm '98, the “storm pole” concept sounds like a way to prevent just such a happening. While a single pole might not be able to withstand high winds or ice, a double pole could, and might act as a stop which would prevent a longer line of poles from going down.
Mudchicken: Where I grew up the SOU and N&W used the canvas bag but had a pole with a “Y” at the top, Two u shaped contactors connected to a pair of wires that came down the pole. A person out on the road pushed the pole up, turned it 90 degrees lowered it gently onto the phone line, connected their “field phone” and called whomever they needed to call. Thanks for jogging the memory! Boy would that be a great model for some one in hi- rail.
In Canada the Cdn. Broadcasting Corp (CBC) . had two trans Canada networks whose breadcasts were transmitted over the CNR and CPR wires There was also a feed over the CPR lines from Montreal to Sackville , New Brunswick through the state of Maine for CBC International Service whose antennas are still in Sackville transmitting around the world.
It wasn’t too bad hooking the right wires in daylight, but it could be hard at night.
Some roads listed the correct wire pairs to use for each section of the railroad in the employee timetable. It didn’t matter which way you got the wires as long as you got the right pair. Ah well, back to the dinosaur cave…
(and don’t you also remember the “Party Line” etiquette and what sounded like yelling down a deep well on the handset plus all the noises and humming that outdid even the best soundtrack from Star Wars?)
Yet another oddity I came across concerning poles and pole lines is that some RRs had certain routes that had pole lines on both sides of the tracks. The two that come to my mind (just from pictures) is CNW’s “Overland Route” mainline in Iowa (likely in Illinois as well); probably up until sometime in the early or mid-60’s and the MILW’s mainline between Chicago and the Twin Cities (which I saw myself back in the very early 80’s) plus the MILW’s “D & I” mainline between Chicago and Savanna. Why would some roads do this as opposed to having pole lines with several stacks on one side of the track?