Rough justice. Same thing occasionally happens when thieves attempt to steal from live power lines or substations. Tough luck - no sympathy from me. See also this webpage for “Galvanized Theft Deterrent Cable” for this (and other) applications:
ERICO - apparently originally “Electric Railway Improvement Company” - is a major supplier of this type of thing, both signal and power bonds. See these other webpages and documents:
Thanks to all for confirming my memory hasn’t completely failed. I purposely did not scroll down from the initial question until I had reached back to come up with “bond wire”.
Never thought about that aspect until now. I’m pretty sure I’ve seen both but now that you mention it, I guess drilling into the ball might not be real good for it.
Recently saw a story about a couple of ne’er-do-wells who thought they’d make off with some wire that was carrying 13,200V at the time. They didn’t get two feet, never mind two blocks…
Or the stories about people discovering thieves in their basements, stealing the copper pipe even as the residents were sitting upstairs watching TV…
Here is a new ‘bond wire’ attachment that resulted after a shoofly was eliminated in Ontario, CA, with the Vineyard Ave. underpass construction.
Ontario is in Southern California on Union Pacific’s Sunset Route, with Vineyard Ave. in the neighborhood of M.P. 522. The photo was taken June 29, 2015, a day after the shoofly was eliminated.
The picture looks similar to those I helped install on the PRR in the late fifty’s except that the ones we installed were drilled and hammered in. We used a hand drill rig and I don’t thing the rail head was hardend. Thank goodness! While the bits we had were very dull, it still took a lot of lube oil and time (15 min) to drill the holes. Then the easy part of pounding the bonds into the hole. Wished we had had thermite back then.
