Steel Rail and Copper Line Blues

Today we often text people to set up a time for a phone call, but out where we live, we went through a period of offering Skype in case the phone line wasn’t clear. With trends driving us to acquire the latest thing, the old systems lose their market share and fail.

When I was young, I visited the pollywog pond, looked for caves and followed tracks in the woods. I also followed the Bell linemen whenever I found one working on the telephone lines around our house in Val Morin. I asked questions and watched. They almost always assumed the role of friendly uncle, answering and explaining.

In those days, we could set our clock to the train leaving the station or passing by, originally trailing steam and smoke, at the same time every day.

Years later, working with a group of volunteers trying to save the CP rail line, I met some of the men, CP engineers and planners – yes, they were all men back then. Friendly young men, not much older than I was. They reminded me of the Bell linemen from my youth. They explained that they could not compete with trucking or cars. The rail infrastructure needed rebuilding, but there was not enough business to justify the costs. At every election some politician declared that your support of their party would mean better roads – trains were not controlled the same way because the government at the time they were set up did not have the vision to understand public infrastructure on such a scale. I was told that there were some busier train lines near cities that needed the rails and the quality of the steel in our rails from St. Jerome to Ste. Agathe was first class. They could serve the private owner better somewhere else. The steel north of Ste. Agathe was eventually sold to Gillette to make razor blades. One could argue that the railway lines should have belonged to the government, but you would have had to make that argument back in the 1870s.

Canada once had the most advanced telephone system in the world. We had copper lines running to every house in the countryside. Our governments gave monopoly rights to the telephone company provided that it supplied every house, every voter. It worked for a long time.

Then car phones, followed by cellphones, entered the marketplace. Next came VoIP, Voice over Internet Protocol. The quality and reliability of these new services varied. The clear, simple reliability of a copper wire connection is hard to beat. Since it is powered from a central place, it works even if the power goes off. In a prolonged power failure, it remained generally reliable. It was low voltage direct current, two thin copper lines going to each phone, and they were bundled tightly with all the neighbours’ lines, so it was very resistant to those storms that can take out our electricity. They were available allowing us to tell the electric company that their lines were down. The power lines could not be bundled the same way because they risked shorting out. The high voltage lines travel at a distance, and that also lets them shed heat more easily.

There was something that bugged us about this old copper phone system though. We perceived it as basic and we couldn’t understand why it was so expensive. It was old technology, rugged and reliable, but it needed to be maintained, and it couldn’t compete financially with the cheap new wireless cell and internet options. It couldn’t even support a whole lot of extra features.

But if you dialed 911, said nothing and dropped the receiver, the emergency services would find you.

With fewer people in the neighbourhood using land lines, the price had to rise to maintain those who did or the service had to erode. We don’t want to pay for it any more than we want to pay the rates that would allow the railroad to rebuild its infrastructure.

There is a strong element of Joni Mitchell’s not knowing what you’ve got ‘til it’s gone. Bell’s copper phone lines cannot be maintained for a tiny minority – the costs per user are too high. The system was not being renewed, and the existing lines were failing. The linemen were as amazing as they always had been, keeping a dying system functioning through sheer determination and their local knowledge.

When it became too unreliable, our options were limited. The cell signal worked only with a booster on the roof. VoIP was a possibility, but its quality was still not up to scratch. It worked with clear images because a lot of our comprehension is enhanced by seeing the face of the person talking. Both systems are useless in a power failure, though. We were dependent on electricity to run the booster and the computer, and if the power failure is long enough, even the cell tower’s backup power will fail. Copper lines didn’t.

For most power failures, a good electrical backup system could carry us. Our computer, and even our UPS (uninterrupted power supply) battery, will either refuse to work or be damaged by electricity from a generator, and additional battery packs are generally based on ‘rare earth’ minerals, lithium, and so on, meaning that they are not very ‘green.’ Yes, that is correct: Electric cars are not ‘green.’ Cars are not ‘green.’ Electric ones might be better than petroleum ones, but the best action is to keep the old car going for as long as possible.

The only option to replace the copper lines that Bell can no longer service is to install a good quality UPS. Clean and sort of green – and rechargeable from the generator, remembering that the generators mostly run on gas. We could also use solar cells to recharge them, but we have come to depend upon the cellphone option for emergencies.

In the meantime, we lost our rugged, reliable old systems based on steel rails, copper lines and low tech. Don’t blame the companies or the government. It’s the consumers’ fault. We do not value what we have, and advertisers play on that, so we convince ourselves that we need the latest thing. We no longer appreciate the solid technology that carried us through the 20^th century, and no doubt the children would prefer to play Minecraft or some other computer game than to explore caves or visit the pollywog pond. I can’t blame them. Our pond was filled in to improve the road.