This was a North-South railroad route that goes back to the 1840s and connects Boston with Middleboro, MA (about 35 miles away) with commuter rapid transit and some freight to this day. This photo was taken in the Atlantic section of Quincy, MA...northernmost, bordering Boston.

Very early telegraph lines were strung along this stretch although very little is known about the oldest insulators used upon them.

This image shows a 6-pin Western Union telegraph line which was upgraded to new (cedar) poles and 10-pin crossarms as well as hard-drawn copper wire in the middle or late teens.

Since this line was in my "neighborhood" I never found anything totally exciting along it except for a few purple Whitall Tatum No.1's which I contend were later replacements for previously broken insulators. When Western Union rebuilt this route only double-petticoat insulators (mostly CD 145s) were re-used. The telegraph openwire was removed through Middleboro (to the south) in 1967 leaving two crossarms of (later) RR communications circuits.

When the transit authority totally rebuilt the previously unused trackage in the mid-1990s I was able to acquire a couple ancient 30-inch (over-the-crossarm) braces from the 1890s construction (seen above). The forementioned WU openwire removal in 1967 went through the city I lived in at the time (Brockton, MA) and this certainly led to plenty of fun checking out and bringing home plenty of insulators that summer, even though they were dirty common types. But with plenty of elbow-grease and determination as a kid I got a lot of these (then-not-common to me) pieces looking great via my mother's kitchen sink and lots of SOS pads, cleaner, etc. She was very supportive. In retrospect 1967 was the year my insulator-collecting fantasia really took off!

For my insulator-collecting biography please click onto:

http://www.vintagestreetlights.com/bio/joeins01.html

Or simply go to my vintage street lighting page at: http://www.vintagestreetlights.com ...and on the left-side menu-bar click onto "Insulator Collecting"

The forementioned references are for educational purposes ONLY.

**Added note: In 1974 I continued the "Insulator By-Lines" monthly column in Old Bottle Magazine after the late insulator-collecting-pioneer Frances Terrill retired. I resumed this post until 1981. After that time I began submitting periodic work to Crown Jewels Magazine. In 1990 I made major contributions to the McDougalds Insulator Reference Book. Since the introduction of ICON in 1995 (thanks, Bill Meier!) I have truly enjoyed educating the insulator community with the same vivid enthusiasm as I did when I started with Western Collector Magazine in 1967 assisting the late Claire McClelland's monthly columns that were the first our hobby enjoyed.