A shot of the pole line along the old Pennsy Line east of Columbia City, Indiana

In 1972 I started picking this Pennsy mainline that ran between Fort Wayne, IN and Chicago. Back then it was a six crossarm pole line and all the lines were up including the communication lines. For some reason the railroad took down the bottom crossarms in 73. Lucky for me they left them below the pole.

This line was just loaded with CREB and Petticoat beehives and other goodies. It was not uncommon to see over 15 CREB and Petticoat beehives on one pole. There is still a pole up with 17 CREB beehives on it. For some reason they left the poles up in this section when they took the pole line down in 97.

On this day I decided to shoot some of the poles that were still standing late in the evening before I picked the last of the better insulators. By this time I had already picked the better insulators long ago.

Scanned from a 35mm negative using a Pentax PZ-10 camera, Pentax FA 28-80mm f/3.5-4.7 lens.

April 29, 1999