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[quote user="riprap"]I haven't had many chances to see American railroads up close, but at least with the UP in Oregon, and the BNSF everywhere, the trend seems to be to take out all of the telegraph poles that would run on the ROW.  The explanation given me is that now all of this type of communication can be done by "radio".  My question:  Is this a national trend, or are there still certain kinds of lines or geographical conditions that allow the poles to stay where they are (I always kind of liked them, they gave a rhythm to the Amtrak riding experience)??  Just curious.... Riprap[/quote] Better to refer to them just as "poles" or the "pole line."  Telegraph is way before my career and I've been in railroading for 30 years now.  Telephone circuits were common into the 1980s but have almost completely disappeared from railroad pole lines.  The most common remaining function is to carry code (in CTC applications) and block-occupancy information (for ABS), and power for the signal system.  Electrical power remains the only application where the pole line can still be an economical solution.  (The alternative is buried cable.)  There's so far no way around having to provide utility power to installations, and even if you have cab signals you still need electrical power for switch-point indicators, slides fences, and so on.  Through-the-rail code began the decimation of the pole lines and pure radio applications are eliminating what's left.  Peer-to-peer applications are reducing the load on the radio backhaul circuits, too.  I'm not aware of anyone using satellite (except as a back-up to radio when the radio circuits go down) due to the high cost of bandwidth for satellite.  As illustration, the cost for ONE locomotive in a communications-based train-control system, if it did all of its messaging by satellite, is over $1,000 per month.  Do that with a 100 locomotives for 10 years and you're talking real money. I'm not aware of any geographic conditions that make pole lines advantageous over radio, but there are many geographic conditions that give you added incentive to get rid of pole lines:  places with heavy snowfall, places subject to ice storms, places with high theft rates.  In mountainous terrain where it would be expensive to install a lot of microwave towers to get good RF propagation the pole line might have more lasting power. I'm a bit wistful about seeing pole lines come down and not unaware of the irony that I've spent a significant portion of my career building systems that eliminate them.  You could to some degree the importance of a route by glancing at the number of crossarms on the poles -- really important lines had TWO pole lines, one each side, carrying four or more crossarms each -- and when you came across them it affirmed something about that route that now isn't so obvious.  Like stick rail and open agencies, pole lines are part of my career.  I still can't get accustomed to seeing main lines sans pole lines -- in my experience if there wasn't a pole line, it was a branch line. S. Hadid
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