Here's some more brain candy for Jeff!

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Quad bridle wire is still heavily used in the big city environments around here. It's usually run from a cable terminal to a drop wire terminal at the pole. It's not used for fuse links much anymore; it's more of a weatherproof cross-connect wire.

It's also used where 25 or 50 pair wall-mounted terminals exist on the outside of buildings to extend pairs to adjacent NIDS being installed.

I still keep one-pair single-pair bridle wire in stock, and plenty of drive and bridle rings, but rarely use them anymore.

The only fat rubber bridle wire we see around these parts is in really, really old locations. Some of the independent LEC's around here still have plenty of the old stuff out there, but it's fading away as they are generally shifting to buried plant.

As for the station wire vs: inside wiring cable question: Station wire is not paired, it is two, three, four or six parallel conductors that are not twisted. Inside wiring cable is always twisted pair.

My grandmother's house in North Carolina was built in 1952 and virtually untouched since she built it. Both of her black rotary dial (still rented from United/Sprint/Embarq) phones were hardwired. They used the three-conductor fabric-insulated twisted wire cable without a jacket and 42A blocks. It was run along the baseboards using large-head tacks that were nailed between the conductor twists. All that was in her house was brown or maybe black, but I have also seen this wire in ivory color with plastic insulation in Bell territories.

Ed Vaughn, MBSWWYPBX