Railroaders' Nostalgia > Tuning Fork

Any Old Head SP Trainmen remember what this unit was used for????

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"Tone-up" the dispatcher? 

Charlie
 

cewherry Wrote:
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> "Tone-up" the dispatcher? 
>
> Charlie\

Correct, before there was a code to punch up
>  

WAF Wrote:
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> cewherry Wrote:
> --------------------------------------------------
> -----
> > "Tone-up" the dispatcher? 
> >
> > Charlie\
>
> Correct, before there was a code to punch up
> >  

In between, there was a button to a tone generator on a single pitch like the tuning fork. The radios were connected to the dispatcher phone. The tone would connect the radio to the dispatcher phone and they could talk on the dispatcher phone, which was disconcerting when they started talking without regard to what we were doing. We called the tone button the panic button. Some guys figured out that if they held the button long enough, they would latch on to more than one station and start a feedback to 'punish' the dispatcher for whatever perceived misdeed. The feedback would interfere with the pulses from the Western Electric 62A selector http://www.railroad-signaling.com/telephones/62a.jpg and we might spend 20 minutes we couldn't afford trying to unlatch the radios.

One engineer who was a regular at 'punishing' me was in the hole at Browning on a 1% ascending grade with 6000ish tons. He had been there about 10 minutes, so I knew he was probably there with a full service application. Often the CTC was slow and seconds or sometimes minutes would elapse between something happening and when I would see it happen, generating the ire of clowns like this. It was a Sunday. I only had three trains on that segment of CTC (two machines), so the indictions were real time. The east man this guy was in for was by and I immediately lined him out of the siding. After a minute or so, I was sure that he almost had a release on the train and was tugging but not moving. I called on the radio: You moving yet? Of course he wasn't. 'Well, that's not going to work; you'll be there for one more' (which was the plan in the first place. Funny thing. He didn't use the radio to punish me after that.

TAW

Thx for the info...
 

Although I never saw anyone actually carrying a tuning fork, there were certain "Hard-Charger" SP engineers
working around Los Angeles in the late 1960-s-early 70's that had visited their local Radio Shack store to
buy what were called "Tone-Generators". After watching several of my 'Brothers' try to use them, with less than
satisfactory results; seems like it took two-hands and a set of knees to get the device properly positioned to squawk
into the radio handset, I decided they were too much hassle and never used one. It wasn't too long before the
railroad started publishing "Radio Call-In" codes in the timetable and the need for the buggers disappeared.

Charlie