On a recent trip to absorb some big-city culture, I spent 2 1/2 days with my good friend, Garrison - the same outstanding fellow responsible for the two C.N.R. CD 154s I was able to acquire in the summer of 2004.

Naturally, as usual, I didn't intend to wind up looking for insulators, but as inevitably happens on every vacation, they wind up looking for me, and thus - I'm caught picking insulators when I'm supposed to be enjoying myself.

Here, Garrison & I stopped to eat our lunch in a park. A full stomach, and a child-like desire to explore the area resulted in us stumbling across this railroad yard merely a few hundred feet from where we were sitting. The first evidence of the yard was the pole shown in this photo, which happened, coincidentally, to be the only one in the dozen or so surrounding poles to have any aqua-coloured glass. On the bottom of the lower arm was a shining steely blue G.N.W. TEL. CO. CD 145 with a G.T.P. blotout behind the embossing. Unable to scrounge up any other method on such short notice, we decided to utilize the primitive "long-stick" method, and prodded that 90 year-old piece of glass until it was freed from it's restricting locust-wood pin.

Hopefully his first wasn't a disappointment. This is my first in a while as well, and I couldn't have asked for more!