Last month I took a long distance train trip, from Sacramento to Chicago. One thing I noticed all along the tracks were these old telegraph wires on old fashioned glass insulators. I actually managed to accidentally get a good photo of them when a pole came into the frame while I was trying to photograph the Colorado River:
Do these wires still server any purpose? In some places they looked to be in poor condition; broken insulators and dangling wires and such things, so I assumed they were unused but left in place because it was uneconomical to take them down. But one of the wires appeared to be connected to a signal. So I wondered if these wires still controlled some of the signals and switches. Or for all I know maybe the wire was just still there, but not actually connected to the signal and the signal was actually controlled some other way.
It looks like there was another thread asking the same question back in 2009, but no one really had a definitive answer, and for that mater the answer may have changed since then.
I don’t know about telegraph wires. But telephone wires & poles used to use those glass insulators. So did electric lines. There’s probably no way to tell for sure, but my guess is that that’s either a telephone or electric line that may have just a handful of customers left. If that were an actual telegraph line, I don’t think it would still be standing–weather and/or erosion probably would have toppled it by now.
Probably the poles in good condition only are in use.
Where the poles are falling down, they might be bypassed by buried cables.
This could be done per section .,… someone summing up the total cost of ownership per mile per year in that area, and deciding to invest in the change over. The poles in solid ground are fine, when its in soft ground, they may give up on the poles and bury the cables under ground next to the track. The poles may make sense when its bridge or raised section of line, since they are up away from water.
The insulators and spacing were for telegraph/telephone …due to lack of insulation on each wire, and also they found it worked better, for telegraph and then telephone, when they had the wires that far apart, and that far above the possibly conductive wood of the pole. But these days there is no requirement to solve noise that way…theres other solutions. One of the cables may be a bundle of telephone style wires, twisted pair ( which is twisted to a standard … to solve noise issues ) … for the actual signals… which are more sophisticated, two way flow from signals, confirmed operation of the signal and switch, reporting of faults with signals or switches, and a flow of info about manually operated switches and trains detected on tracks , etc The network cables now received by differential amplifiers with high “common mode rejection ratio”, which basically means it ignores noise that is measured between the signal wire and the earth at that site.
They’re communication and signaling wires owned by the railroad. As radio has taken over much of the signaling duty the number of wires has dwindled, but there’s usually still a handful in use. I even documented some new/replacement poles near me back in 2009, as this particular railroad still had 16 in-use wires. B&O/CH&D - Baltimore & Ohio/Cincinnati, Hamilton & Dayton - CSX, Cincinnati Terminal Subdivision (near the bottom).
On a recent road trip we recently noticed that there were a lot fewer of these than in decades past. We had assumed telephone. When was telegraph last used widely for any purpose?
I think Roland Emmerich explained in Independece Day that we still need those telegraphs to fend off an alien invasion. Nobody has refuted that argument, have they?
Any still remaining ones are not actual telegraph lines, but used for railroad switches & traffic signals. But they’re being replaced by buried cables or radio communications. Some of the remaining ones may actually be dead, unused lines – even with the current price of copper, it’s still not cost effective for the railroad to take them down. But some may still be in use – they’re built & paid for years ago; why spend money replacing them when they still work? That plan will last until the maintenance expenses get too high.
But they served another valuable purpose in the past. They provided the railroad right-of-way to run coaxial and then fiber cables cross country without difficulty in acquiring easements, government permission, etc. So they were able to get a head start in the business for their Southern Pacific Railroad Internal Telegraph (known by its initials), which they eventually spun off as a separate company.
The “hotline” telecommunications link between the Pentagon and the Kremlin, aka the “red telephone”, was a teletype system until 1986 (when it became telefax). Teletype is essentially a more modern version of telegraph (where the receiving machine automatically prints out readable characters).
