Utility poles

I was standing on a guardrail post along a narrow section of West Virginia Route 2 along the Ohio River trying to get a photo of something when I saw how the utility poles looked in the setting sun. 

And I got to thinking about how there are people who are fascinated by these things. They'll look at this and tell what type or style of pole it is, what insulators are used and what voltage or wattage is carried on the wires. Some people are nuts about trains, some about river boats and some about utility poles. Half a lifetime ago I would have thought such people were nuts. Today I think it's great.


I guess they still call these things insulators -- the things at the top of the pole where the wires are.

A hundred years or so ago, when I was a small boy, we would find green glass insulators in the woods or along roadsides every now and then. Later, I heard there were collectors who paid good money for the things we chucked aside as cute but useless. Will collectors go after the things on modern utility poles? Who knows?