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Past HistoryI started collecting insulators when I was around 14 or 15 in the early to mid 1970's. It was my godparent's son, who was the same age as me, who first introduced me to insulators. I'm not sure how he got started in the first place. We used to hike along the railroad tracks that ran through the bush several miles from his house. There was a pole line along the tracks that had been wrecked out by cutting the poles and leaving them laying on the ground. All we had to do, was come along and pick whatever insulators we wanted. I remember many long hikes home with a heavy packsack bulging with our treasures of the day. It wasn't unusual for us to cover 8 to 10 miles of track out and then back again. We would stash our finds along the tracks and pick them up on the way back home.
Some of the pieces we found in those early hunts included CD 102 <> in various ambers as well as aquas. We picked CD 145 Bs, as well as CD 152 Brookfield and Hemingray. There were some porcelain pieces as well, including OB cable tops and other odds and ends. Of course there were oodles of CD 154/155 Dominion-42s in clear and straw colours. We lugged many of them home because each one we found had a slightly different embossing than all the others. I now know that we were looking at date codes and mold numbers on them. I don't remember for sure but we probably picked some CD 108 Dominion-9s and CD 122 Dominion-16s too. Lots of clear glass, with a little colour now and then. As I recall from way back when, you never knew what you were going to find from one pole to the next, except for the ubiquitous Dom-42s.
We did the rail hunts for a couple of summers and then our teenage interests drifted elsewhere. I kept my insulator collection and over the years continued to add pieces occasionally as I would find something in a garage sale, flea market or antique shop. Somewhere along the way my mother bought me a CD 235 Pyrex carnival which was the jewel of my collection for a long time. I still have that one on the shelf. She paid the enormous sum of $18 (Canadian) for it, where I usually paid $0.50 to $2.00 for a piece anywhere else.
Eventually I stumbled across an ad for a book called "800 Insulators - Priced and Illustrated". I ordered the book and it became my bible and guide for collecting for a number of years. It was filled with crude line drawings and vague descriptions of embossings and colours. There were no CD numbers at that time.
My father used to bring home various porcelain pieces from work. Some of them were very large power multiparts. I still have a three-tiered one on a metal post that is almost 15" in diameter and about 18" tall. I have a few other porcelain insulators by CP and OB, but most are unmarked.
By the time I hit 30 my collection was sitting close to 120 pieces including the porcelain stuff, which I had decided I really didn't like collecting by then. It was getting harder and harder to find anything I didn't already have in my home area. During my skydiving days (mid 1980's), I went rail hunting in the Central Ontario area and pulled a bunch of unused CD 143 CanPacs off some poles. I continued to check out flea markets and antique shops, finding a different piece once in a while to bring home. My older sister would sometimes bring me an insulator home from her travels too.
Once I started using the Internet, I did some searches for insulators and found www.insulators.com and some other related sites. This showed me that there was a whole world of information I didn't know about. I did learn about CD numbers and found some online charts which I printed out so I could properly identify what I had.
Copyright © 2007 - Doug Netzke and Micro Solutions of Sudbury