I was out walking near a local RR track, and noticed the old copper telegraph lines by the side. these are 4 lines, bare copper, on glass insulators. Are these lines still used? if not, there must be a huge amount of scrap copper in these things.
When did they go out of use? i assume radio is use now, to carry the signals along the lines.
Though they use radio if they actually need to talk to the train crew, as far as I know the signals and switches are still hardwired. Though most likely it’s not through the bare copper old timey telegraph poles-- they’re probably buried at this point.
Depending on where you live, those lines may still provide power or telephone service to some remote locations, but most likely they are abandoned but it still may not be economic to collect for scrap.
I read that some railroads are making money by allowing companies to bury fiber optic cables near their tracks. The land is already cleared so it’s easy to bury the cables.
I wondered the same thing about 12 years ago when I took a train from Chicago to New Orleans. As I watched the lines along the tracks, in some cases, they were no longer attached to their insulators and hanging down on the ground. In other cases, the poles that held them up were broken and laying on the ground.
I assumed that they were no longer in use, but I couldn’t see any actual breaks in the wires. So I wondered if maybe they were very low voltage and didn’t require any insulation and still could be used in that condition.
From the history of Sprint at Sprint Corporation - Wikipedia :
“Southern Pacific Communications Company (SPCC), a unit of the Southern Pacific Railroad, began providing long-distance telephone service shortly after the Execunet II decision late in 1978. The Railroad had an extensive microwave communications system along its rights of way used for internal communications. In 1972, they began selling surplus time on that system to corporations for use as their own Private Line Network, thereby circumventing AT&T’s then-monopoly on public telephony, later expanding to fiber optic cables laid along those same rights of way subsequent to the Execunet II decision late in 1978.”