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Does any one know why some Birneys had the poles mounted on little lattice towers?  The one in the photo below is Eastern Massachusetts Street Railway.  Later, some of these were sold to the Concord (NH) Electric Railways and ran to Whites Park, near where I used to live.

The Waterbury and Milldale line in Connecticut, which ran two double-truck Birneys, had each pole mounted on its own little tower. Was it a safety thing? Or was it just to reach the wire?  Thanks for whatever light you can shed on this.

Bruce

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You may be right about the wire height.  Since Birneys had a flatter roof than most streetcars and therefore were lower, they might need longer poles to reach wire that was mounted high.  Longer poles, however, would have interfered with storing the cars in car barns.  The storage issue has been cited as the reason some operators changed from two-pole to single-pole for their Birneys.

It is, in fact, a wire height issue.  The streetcars that the Birneys replaced tended to have deck roofs, so the pole bases needed to be raised to get the same pole height to reach the wire properly.  In addition to storage issues,  longer poles would have had tracking issues on the overhead. 

Here's an online version of Harold Cox's book on the subject: 

http://streetcars.telcen.com/books/birney/index.html

Not all Birneys had the towers, of course... 

MItch

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