Telephone poles
First, while I admire anyone who is willing to do scratchbuilding, sometimes it is sort of reinventing the wheel.
I wrote up some information a while back, and I am placing it here, so please forgive if this duplicates some of the other posts.
There are three types of lineside poles, and their types gets kind of mixed up as the use has changed over the years. Probably the most common poles and lines were Telegraph poles. It is likely that the specs exist online, but I didn't go far enough to find them. Secondly, in more recent years, especially, telephone lines paralleled the train tracks. In some cases the telegraph poles probably carried phone lines- or at least railroad company phone lines. Consider that the right of way was already there between towns, and the Bell System, GTE or some small phone companies would only have to make an agreement, and probably pay a fee for the use of the strip of land for the poles. Then there are power lines. In a number of areas, the power companies made use of the railroad ROW, and a few are very obvious. A Reading Company line out of suburban Philadellphia has huge steel poles straddling their tracks- These are also catenary supports, and was some kind of special arrangement with the railroad. On the former Boonton Branch of the Lackawanna, then Erie Lackawanna and I think still under the same branch name in New Jersey Transit, a few miles West of the Bergen Tunnels, catenary supports also hold power lines erected by the power company (Probably Public Service Electric and Gas of NJ) so this gets a little complicated- but in general, most modelers want the poles that lned mile after mile of track all over the U.S.
Fortunately, telegraph poles were virtually identical with telephone poles.
Now about reinventing the wheel- Walthers did a good job of showing what a lot of different poles look like in the instruction sheet they supply with their utility pole set. http://www.walthers.com/exec/productinfo/933-3101 is a link directly to the description of this model.
The product itself is interesting because it has the large insulatiors for power lines plus several variants of telephone and telegraph poles. There are some large commercial power transformers and small ones included with several diagrams of typical installations. The poles are tapered- and this is a difficult and time consuming facet of scratchbuildng if you are putting line along your track. There are several sizes of poles. This is also not an ad for Walthers- Power insulatiors I have seen were always deep red or black glazed ceramic. Telegraph lines (and probably phone lines as well) insulators were clear glass, green glass, or black ceramic. The clear colors can be simulated using silver for the clear or a mix of silver and green to make a metallic green which passes for the green glass. The fact that these are not actually clear may not be satisfactory for some modelers, and there is a solution. Rix makes clear molded phone pole crossarms whch are to be painted leaving the insulators clear. Tamiya and other paint makers have clear green paint and a drop of this on a clear insulator looks exactly like a green glass insulator. Rix has several different sets of poles and crossarms available, including separate arms with insulators. The link is : http://rixproducts.com/6280031.htm
Not everyone wants to get too involved with the lineside detail of the Walthers and Rix sets, and the Atlas models, available for years and still at a low price, are excellent models. As suggested here, they can be easily modified. The HO set includes some extra details too, such as line boxes for crews to call in on company phone lines. They also have the poles in N scale. A link to their site is: https://secure.atlasrr.com/mod1/searchresult.asp
The prototype poles have many, many variations but generally conform to standards. On Long Island Railroad are some unique power lines along the Babylon branch and some other locations, of metal lattacework, for example. Some roads had clearance problems and the crossarms extend on one side of the pole only. (Cut off one side of the crossarms) and in a lot of locations were single arms or double arms whcih are easily simulated by cutting off extra arms you don't need.
Where I used to live, the lower portion of the pole in the ground and extending up to about a foot out of the soil was treated and as a result was black. For various reasons, some poles had white stripes near the base. In New Jersey, some of these indicated a fire alarm box on the pole, and often there was a light farther up the pole.
A seldom modeled feature of utility poles, when placed along a road they held street lamps. The Walthers set has a number of dummy lamp arms that simulate this, and the Walthers line has operating moden lamp heads and arms that can be used on a phone pole with a little modification to simulate recent applications. (since the 1960s) . A link is: http://www.walthers.com/exec/productinfo/933-2310
Turn on the radio and get out the sandpaper, with a bunch of dowels you cut to length, and then sand them down to taper each one and you are on your way. (AC Moore, or other craft stores have them in bags, or Home Depot, Lowes or other household stores have them) I haven't found insulators anything as nice as the pre made ones, but you could turn them on your lathe from clear acrylic rod. If you cannot get a high spectral finish (if they are translucent instead of transparent, either a drop of Pro Weld or Tenax may clear up the finish, or possibly Future floor finish may work better. For those who like to do casting, turn a few of them and then cast them in clear polyester resin, which can be tinted green if you like.
Stringing lines rates another book-length entry, but I had better leave that for another day. I hope this is of help.
