Railroaders' Nostalgia > Telephone & Radio Communications on the Southern Pacific

In the 1970s on the SP we had our own telephone system on which the actual instruments had dials. You could dial another phone on your division, or dial the right code and then dial elsewhere on the system. Only if you were in the right office could you dial 9 and get an outside (non-SP) number. If you needed to call an outside number some distance away, you would dial the code for the nearest SP operator and ask her for that outside number there, thus minimizing long distance charges from the non-railroad telephone carrier. You could not call a locomotive or caboose by phone.

By 1980 our phones were changing to push button styles and local operators were becoming unemployed. For instance, we had 1- 3 operators (none after 5 PM) at Oakland (CA) and that went to zero. San Francisco had around 7 plus a chief operator, which suddenly dropped to 3, but always had a chief operator on duty 24 hours a day, until the radio-telephone system became 100% available with modern phones at all locations. Lineside phones as found in concrete phone booths or in wooden cabinets mounted on poles, might be dial phones but could be useless without knowledge of the company phone number you wanted to reach. Company phone directories were rarely found in those booths. Non-dial phones were usually for direct contact with a train dispatcher. 

In the mid-70s about 80% of company automobiles and trucks were equipped with 2-way radio and could contact trains. About 60% of those vehicles had radio-telephone channels with which you could call out anywhere with operator assistance. In that same time period most locomotives and cabooses had limited channel radios. Thus, out on line or in the yard, they could only communicate on what was called the "road" channel. In the yard, locomotives in yard service used the yard channel to reach other yard engines or radio equipped offices.

By the 1990s, locomotives often had multi-channel radios that even included the PBX radio-telephone channels. Once train crews discovered this, you occasionally heard one of them call home to tell his spouse when he was running late. Bottom line: any radio use was open for all the railroad, and anyone for that matter, to hear. After a long day I was headed home around 7 PM one evening back when the use of the PBX required the help of the railroad's telephone operator to dial the call. One of the executives from San Francisco keyed his microphone and the female voice then heard was “Southern Pacific San Francisco Operator”. He identified his mobile unit as SP-5 or whatever the digit was and gave her a Walnut Creek area phone number to call. After a couple of rings, his wife answered (no caller ID back then) in a pleasant voice and the executive said in a burst of speech “I'm in the company car, calling on the radio-telephone so don't say anything, just listen!”. He told her what he needed her to do and then asked “Do you understand?” . No response. Twice more he asked the same question, each time sounding a bit more anxious. She finally hesitantly said “Yes”. He ended simply “SP-5 out”. And probably never called home again on the radio.

Pictured: A few rules of the 6 pages of Radio Rules in the SP rule book...
 



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 04/09/21 20:32 by Westbound.

---

You would get BFB or Furth calling home. R.L. King GM and later VPO was the biggest user of the PBX getting a nightly rundown from OP&C , which became very lenghty as the SP was falling apart operational-wise in 78.

By 1980, you could direct dial your party at One Market 541-xxxx

As pointed out PBX operatords were no longer needed and the caller just dialed the number they wanted and hung up and the tower to call went to would end it "Grizzly Peak.. out"



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 04/09/21 07:28 by WAF.

When I was a truck driver in the mid 90s, I not only had a CB in my truck but also a scanner. One of the things I used to enjoy listening to were the early morning status meeting calls over the raido to pbx while enroute from Southern California to Arizona. From what I think I remember, there was a cheif dispatcher and a chief of MOW from each area on the "call". It would go on for about 30 minutes. Somewhere in the 4-7 AM period.

I was on a Los Angeles Division hi-rail trip with Denman McNear (I believe President of the SPRR at the time) one afternoon when he received a message from his San Francisco office to call home immediately.  He had to go through the PBX operator and the operator dialed his home number.  Mrs. McNear had some important questions about which eggs to purchase at the store in Petaluma.  After a few minutes of polite conversation over the PBX, the tough decision was sorted out and all was well.  A couple of us in the back seat of the hi-rail could barely hold in our sudden urge to laugh out loud, but we kept quiet and were thankful that Denman and Mrs. Denman were able to solve the opportunity of the eggs.

In the Army, I was in the Signal Corps.  I had two phones on the console where I worked.  One was for local calls and the other was an AUTOVON phone, the Automatic Voice Network.  I was stationed on Okinawa.  Just about every weekend I would call the operator at Ft Knox and ask her if she could complete a call to Louisville.  They always did it for me.  One weekend I would talk to my parents and the next weekend I would talk to my fiance.  

When I was stationed at Ft Monmoth, NJ., I would volunteer at the MARS station (Military Affiliated Radio Service) and run phone patches for guys in Vietnam.  We would establish communications with the station in Vietnam.  They would give us a list of maybe 5 numbers.  We would call the AT&T operators and pass the numbers to them.  They would call the party collect.  When the called party was on the line I would explain how the call worked.  They had to say "over" when they finished and when the soldier said "over,' they could talk again.  It was a way for the parties to have a 3 minute call for the price of a 3 or 4-minute call from New Jersey to say Chicago or Denver.  It was a lot cheaper than a call from Vietnam to those cities.  I had one call to Hawaii.  It was still cheaper than a direct call from Vietnam.  

Most people don't know that the cellular carrier Sprint began as a service associated with the SP RR. The name came from the acronym for  Southern Pacific Railroad Internal Network Telecommunications.  

John

wa4umr Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> In the Army, I was in the Signal Corps.  I had
> two phones on the console where I worked.  One
> was for local calls and the other was an AUTOVON
> phone, the Automatic Voice Network. 

AUTOVON !!, now there's a name I haven't heard for over 55 years; since my days, actually 16 hour nights,
in Base-Ops at Hamilton AFB. Wow!

Charlie ('Whiskey Yankee" to the FSS and ARTC folks at Oakland)

 



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 04/10/21 10:34 by cewherry.

I used Autovon while in the military to call home and girl friend thru North Island Navy Base in San Diego. Also used it at Clark Air base in the P.I to call home. Sure saved lots of money back in the late 1960's.

Larry

Autovon is now known as DSN (Defense Switched Network).

I liked how in the '60s, I could call the SP's Bakersfield phone number from home and state to the operator "Could you give me the Mojave ticket office?" I wasn't with the SP but the operator would transfer me immediately to Mojave without question. This saved me from making long-distance phone calls to Mojave.

Sometimes you can't let a thread go unanswered! Working the Roseville to Bakersfield Pool both before and after the UP takeover the PBX could be real handy
at times. I used it in the SP days to notify the roundhouse or or whoever needed some info on the train, not unusual at all as most SP guys here would probably
agree. After the UP takeover and cell phones still legal in making such calls the PBX use slowed down at least where I worked for most of the operating calls.
At some point in the Roseville Hub and massive hirings of new Trainmen who never even heard of the PBX system I wondered if the thing still worked. Coming
around the corner where Elvas tower once worked I thought I would give it a try. Punching the digital radio onto 6252 and hitting the code I got a dialtone. My
Conductor came over and said what is that? I proceeded to dial 789-5250...the next thing was Roseville Roundhouse, RH1. I proceeded to give the train ID, coming
around the corner at Elvas and a unit that had failed in the consist. He got it and told me he wouuld have the Yardmaster bring the power to the House instead of
the Subway. At the end of the call I hung up, went through the procedure with the PBX to disconnect the call with the last time I ever heard "SP Mount Vaca out".
All the Conducctor said was what the heall was that?

Another memory; in the late 60's, some of the engineers I worked with on the SP purchased, for want of a
better term, battery powered 'tone generators' at their local Radio Shack. To reach the DS they keyed the
radio handset to talk while holding the 'toner' near the mouth-piece and pushed the magic buttons of the toner.
If all went well the DS would answer the radio quickly since they didn't know if the call came from a signal maintainer,
section foreman or the president of the railroad. These 'toners' enjoyed a brief popularity before later radios with key-pads
came into use.

Charlie  



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 04/14/21 08:54 by cewherry.

Yeah, Radio Shack got some grief from the phone companies for selling those boxes.

This method didn't work so well for me in the 1980s, when I tried to call the SP depot on the Mina branch in Nevada--through the San Francisco PBX operator.

"I can't connect you unless you tell me WHO YOU ARE!"



johnsweetser Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> I liked how in the '60s, I could call the SP's
> Bakersfield phone number from home and state to
> the operator "Could you give me the Mojave ticket
> office?" I wasn't with the SP but the operator
> would transfer me immediately to Mojave without
> question. This saved me from making long-distance
> phone calls to Mojave.

We didn't purchase those tone generators, we were issued them in Dunsmuir.  Might have been when the crew dispatcher jobs were abolished thus ending the age old practice of crew callers physically giving you your call at home or elsewhere within a defined radius.  Something that was required by the labor agreements.  Providing a tone generator was a step towards defusing the arguments pertaining to the tones required to dial into centralized crew dispatching.   I don't recall any instruction on using the PBX but it was learn by word of mouth.  The SP system was a playground for Phone Phreaks.  The best overheard PBX conversation was Charlie Babers ridiculing a certain Oregon Dvision Supt flying in a small plane during a storm to a derailment on the Siskiyou Line.  

There were other gadgets that went into the junk drawer like manual clicker/counters for car counting,  

sphogger



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 04/20/21 15:41 by sphogger.

I have two recollections of the SP phone system.  Back around 1970 Nolan Zisman and I were in BTR (the Bureau of Transportation Research) and Nolan was talking over the company phone to somebody in El Paso.  The connection was not good, as was often the case.  Somebody piped up "Nolan, if you opened the window, he could hear you better".

The codes were interesting.  I found out one day if you knew the right codes you could access the phone systems on other rallroads, and if you got it right (lots of codes) you could get all the way to say Philadelphia from San Francsico.  Hearing the person at the other end was another issue.

Some of us were not surprised when SPRINT was not a roaring success, but that may have been the right conclusion for the wrong reasons.

JBWX

 

jbwest Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
>...if you got
> it right (lots of codes) you could get all the way
> to say Philadelphia from San Francsico.  Hearing
> the person at the other end was another issue.
>
> JBWX

I recall reading a story where someone in an AT&SF office in Los Angeles got bored one day & called the phone at a neighboring desk by having the company operator(s) route the call from LA to Chicago & back to the other office phone in LA. It's doubtful it had the "pin drop" clarity popularized in the long distance phone service commercial from years ago.

Desmond Praetzel, "4451 Puff" 
 

wa4umr Wrote:

> Most people don't know that the cellular carrier
> Sprint began as a service associated with the SP
> RR. The name came from the acronym for  Southern
> Pacific Railroad Internal Network
> Telecommunications.  
>
> John

I knew about it, John. In fact, I even had some "hands on" experience with the early SPRINT microwave tower installations.

I helped bring the original armored transmission Wire up the old Tower at Petaluma, on the NWP/SP project there. It was a
steep Climb and not for the faint of heart. Yes, you strapped in with the safety harness, at the work site at the top, but you had
to free climb it to get there. I still have a 3 inch piece of that original cable my lead electrician gave me. Good memories; about 1978.
I was the Helper #5 on the NWP Santa Rosa Electrical Gang. Didn't stay there long, (due to layoff) & then my move over to Amtk in '80.