Purple Beehives
By Jason Nickerson

Reprinted from "Crown Jewels of the Wire", February 2007, page 37

Early May of 2006, while awaiting my impending graduation from the University of New Brunswick, I decided to stay in Fredericton, N.B. instead of returning to my home town in Nova Scotia, to do a solid month of insulator hunting. I managed to get out on several hunts and turned up nothing more than some common pieces of glass.

Being bored with not much else on the go, a buddy of mine called me up one day and asked if I'd like to go to his cottage for a night for something to do. He mentioned that there was a railway track running by there and that we could hunt for some insulators if I wanted to. I said that I would be delighted to go and that I would call him the next morning when I was ready to go.

So, the next morning we packed up our supplies and we drove the few hours to his cottage and wasted no time on getting ready to go for a hike along the tracks. I slowly made my way up the bank to the railway and took a quick peek each way...."clear glass", I said to myself, having seen this many times before my hopes were not high. However, that changed about two poles into the hunt. I looked up on that second pole and my jaw dropped. How could this be? A purple insulator in the wild!!!!! I immediately let out a hoot at the sight of this purple beehive gleaming in the sun. I was still unaware of what type of piece I was looking at. As I got the piece in my hands and spun it around it read T. C. R....I again let out a hoot. I could barely contain myself as my buddy gave me a strange look. Needless same level of excitement as me, until I gave him some information on these pieces.

Trying to calm myself down, I thought to myself, maybe this is the only one left (as it did have a base chip). Maybe someone else has already hunted this line. We made our way to the next pole, and there on the ground was another half of a purple CD# 145 TCR. We quickly made our way to the next pole.... and this is when the fun and the overwhelming excitement began. The next pole contained two perfectly mint purple TCR's!!!!! After that we hit our gold mine, we could see them coming from what felt like miles away. Some poles would have one, some poles would have two. We walked a fair distance until we were not finding anymore colored glass, until we essentially "walked out of them".

We gathered up all the pieces we had found and did a count of how many we had. In total in those couple of hours of hunting we found 16 VNM Purple TCR's, 4 damaged Purple TCR's, 6 Emerald Green CD#145 (f-skirt) G.T.P (r-skirt) B with a varying degrees of amber swirling, 1 CD#169.5 Brookfield in aqua with milk swirling, 1 CD#145 G.T.P in Blue-Gray and some other common colored glass. After making our count, we immediately made plans to come back and hunt this line until our legs fell off. However, due to prior plans we had to wait 5 days to come back.. ..these were the longest 5 days of my life!!!!

We made our way back finally after the 5 days to do a two day hunt. We assumed that since we had only walked one way from the cottage that there was just as much potential in the other direction. We started off great with a Purple T.C.R find immediately, but then our luck ran out. That was the only Purple find of the day, however we did encounter an endless number of CD#145 postal style Star beehives, which I had never seen in Canada before. The next day, in order to cover new ground, we drove about a half an hour to another small town and began our hunt back towards the cottage. We started out with a bang again, 4 purple T.C.R's in the first 20 minutes. After that we ran into the Star beehives again, which by this point we had determined were used in place of T.C.R's on stretches of this line. We walked a bit further and called it a day, but still planned on making a return trip to walk from the small town in the opposite direction as we had gone on this day.

A week later we returned to our new starting point. We walked a fair distance finding nothing but common colored glass. Then, again, we hit pay dirt. We could see something coming on a pole as we walked towards it, however it looked a bit different. As I approached the piece I could see that in fact it was not purple, it was gray. Our first Steel Gray T.C.R, with an amber stringer in it to boot. It was great to find another color to add to the collection. Long story short on this last day we had another great find on this line. The haul on this final day was 4 Steel Gray T.C.R's, 6 Purple T.C.R's (one of which was the first one we found on the ground) and some other colored glass. This ended up as being our last day hunting on this line.

For anyone wondering about this line and why we made no fourth trip, the reason is it had become too difficult to get into places we hadn't been already. The walking distance was too far and there were no roads crossing the line in these remote locations. So for all you collectors out there who would like to find a purple insulator still in the air, there is potential to find more of these pieces on this gold mine line in New Brunswick, Canada.

This was definitely the greatest hunt of my insulator collecting days to date. I can't begin to explain the excitement on a hunt like this. To go from expected disappointment to bursting happiness in minutes is quite a thing. I can't imagine ever finding purple glass in the air again, but let me tell you its quite a sight to see an insulator 3 poles away and know that it's another purple one coming at you!!!!! Very Special thanks to N.P.V.L for making this once in a lifetime hunt possible.

Also, to make this story a little more intriguing, I left one mint purple T.C.R on a pole in an easy to access location, however you might need to be a "night hunter" to get it......