My bottle and insulator collection

[SaskTreasurehunter]

This is my bottle and insulator. Collection has taken a year and a half to get.

 

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[old digger]

''Not bad!'' Keep it up, your doing good.

 

[burgessbogy]

I was given a ton of insulators for a garden art project and I literally have shelves over flowing with the leftovers. I don't know much about the value of any of them. Are there any that are outstanding rare ones, or a particular company, color?

 

[SaskTreasurehunter]

As far as insulators go, with my knowledge rare ones are threadless(no grooves) 7up green, purple. Purple are about 20 to 40 depending on shape(design) and all 7up green are about 40 to 60

 

[NOLA_Ken]

Amber glass is usually valuable, Threadless are the earliest, but many were made as lighning rod insulators long after the threaded types came out. The most common are probably the Hemingray 42 and 45. There are a few sites online where you can look up your insulators and get an idea what you have. Unfortunately all of mine are in my moms garage in Illinois and I can't afford to get them shipped down here. I guess that's a good excuse for a trip home though.

 

[ncsilverspider]

Found this while chasing a Southern Railway steam locomotive #630 along the mainline. (Got a sweet pic of her too!) The insulators are plastic but I'll replace them with glass ones I've found and will display it in my train room. Enjoy!

 

[maipenrai]

Hey, thats a cool looking post and a good place to display your insulators.

 

[ncsilverspider]

Hey, thats a cool looking post and a good place to display your insulators.

Tell me about it. I also found a perfect insulator last weekend while chasing #630. Not a single scratch or nick! Here is a few pics of it and my perfect shot of #630 taken by my phone, trackside. Enjoy!

 

[maipenrai]

I guess that is what you might call "a perfect day"!

 

[ncsilverspider]

I guess that is what you might call "a perfect day"!

It certainly was for me! To bad it's leaving Saturday. (Sniff...) It's been awesome! Good luck!

 

[NOLA_Ken]

I remember years ago when they cut down all the poles on the abandoned tracks where I grew up. My cousin and I walked un countable miles of old track bed picking up insulators and looking for date nails. I still have hundreds of them at my moms in Illinois. I always wanted to grab some of the cross arms to display my best ones on. That'll look really good when you're done!

 

[ncsilverspider]

I remember years ago when they cut down all the poles on the abandoned tracks where I grew up. My cousin and I walked un countable miles of old track bed picking up insulators and looking for date nails. I still have hundreds of them at my moms in Illinois. I always wanted to grab some of the cross arms to display my best ones on. That'll look really good when you're done!

Do you mean the telegraph poles or a railroad crossing sign, because I have on of those to! I would love to find some date nails. BTW my oldest insulator is 1884 found at a train wreck site from 1902.

 

[NOLA_Ken]

They were originally telegraph and telephone lines, but many also were used for railroad signal lines. I found a crossing sign in a dump once but I didn't have any way to get it out of there. Railroad date nails are pretty hard to find in the wild these days, they stopped using them years ago and the old enough ties are long gone. You can sometimes find them in old tie dumps along the tracks though.

I have some pretty old insulators up there, but it's been quite a while since I've looked through them. I'm going to see about getting them all shipped down to me and see what I have.