Insulator Cache

By Eric Foster; posted November 25, 2020

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With hunting season coming to a close here in south eastern Ontario I find myself scrolling through my phone and looking at pictures from this past year. Every year I try and make a point to take more and capture some video but as is always the way I get to wrapped up in the hunt and digging takes priority.

Thankfully, durring this outing in May I was able to capture some great shots of the glass coming out of the ground.

With some unexpected time off thanks to covid layoffs, Matt Furbur and I decided to have a full day hunt. We had first dicided to check out an old rail yard where some construction had been happening lately and scratch around piles of old railway dirt. To my surprise I found a green KCGW signal lying right ontop of a pile! A great way to start the day!

After poking around there and picking the site clean we then figured we would try a 1910s town dump that we knew was nearby. We dug a few hours and were rewarded with a couple local milks, some generic medicines and an interesting green CP insulator.

By this point we were pretty tired and thought it would be a nice break to poke along the abandoned threadless era rail line that was about a half hour away. Matt personally had some luck at this location in the past having found some nice early threaded pieces. We poked and scratched around for a time but it wasn't panning out. Time for plan D.

It was getting later in the day and we both were pretty tired but wanted to try one more location. It was only 20 minutes away and we got there around 6pm.

This location was also an abandoned line that he had found older bits and pieces on before. Shortly after arriving and walking the scrubby ROW for a few minutes we noticed a small accumulation of insulator chunks and out came the probes.

The familiar sound of pitchfork on glass rang out almost everywhere we poked! Of course we didn't bring a shovel with us and started scratching the earth away with our modified forks.

There was a good variety of insulators. Multiple montreal 143s, gnw 143s, ne 133s, b 145s, 1678s, and american 145s. Some were smashed and others were intact. We pieced together the ones that we could and ended up hauling about 20lbs of glass out of there feeling accomplished.

I've cleaned up my share of the finds and they're displayed on my shelves and I look at them often. However, there is something about looking back at the photos from that day that I almost enjoy more than the pieces themselves. They're the real reason I'm able to survive the long cold Canadian winters helping me to remember warmer/happier times.

Hope you folks enjoyed the novel! Thanks for reading :)

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