Hi Ray,
The system you are referring to sounds very similar to the one used by Con Ed as recently as the mid Seventies (my point of departure from the great system), and word had it that it did indeed run over open wire high voltage lines. I suppose that 600/1200/1800 baud stuff could have survived on it, although I haven't any direct knowledge about that. But these were not SLCs as we know them today, they were most assuredly of the analog variety AM.
As far as my experience with rural matters, being a city slicker, I've had a few. One such dilemma that comes to mind immediately is the experiences I had in the NY #2 office in the late Sixties when we were in the process of retiring the O, ON, N N1, N2 and N3 carriers. Most of these went off into the boondocks where L and R carriers feared to tread.
One late evening in the middle of the bleak of winter I was preparing to hand off tricks/TT's to the midnight crew when a gonger went off. When we examined the nature of this alarm (there were NORAD lines on this one system that wouldn't wait) we found that there was this poor soul stranded atop a pole, with a bear nipping at his heals. He had failed the system intentionally to get our attention, and then phoned in on the service desk with his butt set, since the NY office was the only manned location along the span that he could depend on. Make a longer story short, we phoned the local constables in Rheinbeck, NY, and they shewed off the critter. Does it get any more rural than that? <s>
Frank |
