What was in a station telegraph/telephone room?

[Janjy Giggins]

Sorry if this is a silly question, but I'm modelling a station building loosely based on York, c. 1920s-40s. Looking at an image I found of the architectural plans, there's a telegraph room/office. What would this kind of room have actually contained by the early 20th C? Would it have been a public facility for passengers to make calls or send messages, or a private railway office/switchboard for managing communications around the railway? It's not a massive space, but it is fairly visible from the platform so a bit of advice on what to put inside it would be much appreciated. General suggestions are fine - I'm not looking for slavish accuracy to what was actually in York.

Thanks!

[Jeremy Cumberland]

Take a look at this: https://www.crichparish.co.uk/webpages/telegraph.html

[Oldddudders]

have you seen this? A little late for your interest, but includes a scene or two that might help. 

 

 

[keefer]

This came up from an older, similar request. 

Article on the Needle Telegraph used by British railways: 

http://www.samhallas.co.uk/railway/single_needle.htm

[The Stationmaster]

Some stations used to boast signs which said 'You may send a telegram (or 'you may telephone') from this station.  Sendinga telegram wiould have required a public counter separate from the working part of a telegraph office where somebody could write down and pay for their message.  But generally this system was overtaken by the GPO's facility to send telegrams via a  Post Office counter.   'You may telephone normally seems t ohave meant that a public call box of some sort was available - the railway 'phone system would not have been made available for members of the pi ub lic to make calls over it.

 

all stations of any sort of size had a Telegraph Office but over the years what it did and how it did it changed.  Originally they were, literally  'telegraph offices' using either single needle or multi needle telegraph instruments to send messages (in the Western we called what others might calla telegram a w'ire' so details of all sorts of things would be wired.  This meant that you wrote your message , using code words to keep the message short, on a form which you took to the telegraph office for the Telegraph Clerk to send.  In later years that would mainly be done using a voice call between telegram offices or using something akin to a simple version of what became a teleprinter which wrote the message on a strip of paper at the receiving end.  Ultimately that system was replaced by teleprinters between the busier and more important offices.

 

In many places the Telegraph Office also became the local railway telephone exchange which could rpute you onto different networks or even make a call; ob ver 'theNational' (i. the GPO) 'phone network.  This finction was largely replaced by automatic exchanges and. from the late 1950s/early '60s ever increasing use of ETD (the BR equivalent of STD).   At Reading in the mid 1960s a new telephone exchange was provided - one of the few parts of the major station rebuilding scheme of that era to be actually completed  - and the new exchange was also the 'telegraph office' although it used teleprinters (or voice by 'phone) to send wires. 

 

And, believe it or not, single needle telegraph instruments remained in use on some parts of BR until the first half of the 1970s while at the same time BR also had some of the best data links in the country and could transmit data quicker than anyone else in Britain.

 

 

 

[keefer]

History of the Electric Telegraph Company: 

https://distantwriting.co.uk/electrictelegraphcompany.html

 

British railway Telegraph Code Words:

http://www.railwaycodes.org.uk/features/telegraph.shtm

 

[Michael Hodgson]

3 hours ago, The Stationmaster said:

Some stations used to boast signs which said 'You may send a telegram (or 'you may telephone') from this station.  Sendinga telegram wiould have required a public counter separate from the working part of a telegraph office where somebody could write down and pay for their message.  But generally this system was overtaken by the GPO's facility to send telegrams via a  Post Office counter.   'You may telephone normally seems t ohave meant that a public call box of some sort was available - the railway 'phone system would not have been made available for members of the pi ub lic to make calls over it.

 

all stations of any sort of size had a Telegraph Office but over the years what it did and how it did it changed.  Originally they were, literally  'telegraph offices' using either single needle or multi needle telegraph instruments to send messages (in the Western we called what others might calla telegram a w'ire' so details of all sorts of things would be wired.  This meant that you wrote your message , using code words to keep the message short, on a form which you took to the telegraph office for the Telegraph Clerk to send.  In later years that would mainly be done using a voice call between telegram offices or using something akin to a simple version of what became a teleprinter which wrote the message on a strip of paper at the receiving end.  Ultimately that system was replaced by teleprinters between the busier and more important offices.

 

In many places the Telegraph Office also became the local railway telephone exchange which could rpute you onto different networks or even make a call; ob ver 'theNational' (i. the GPO) 'phone network.  This finction was largely replaced by automatic exchanges and. from the late 1950s/early '60s ever increasing use of ETD (the BR equivalent of STD).   At Reading in the mid 1960s a new telephone exchange was provided - one of the few parts of the major station rebuilding scheme of that era to be actually completed  - and the new exchange was also the 'telegraph office' although it used teleprinters (or voice by 'phone) to send wires. 

 

And, believe it or not, single needle telegraph instruments remained in use on some parts of BR until the first half of the 1970s while at the same time BR also had some of the best data links in the country and could transmit data quicker than anyone else in Britain.

 

 

 

To put this in context for the benefit of younger readers of this forum, STD was not what the Americans call an "antisocial disease" but stood for Subscriber Trunk Dialling, introduced in the 1960s. 

 

Before STD came in, you had to call the operator to place a long distance call (one to an exchange outside the local area) even though the phone probably had a dial for local calls.  Some places still had phones where all calls required an operator to make the connection; I remember being sent to call to my school when the bus broke down (mid 1960s)  - the number I called from consisted of the Exchange name and a single digit number, and of course I'd been given 3d to hand to the householder to cover the cost.

 

In this era of the ubiquitous mobile phone and the concept of landlines as old-fashioned, it may not be obvious to youngsters that most houses didn't even have landlines, they were something more used by businessses, an expensive modern luxury for most people.   If you needed to make a phone call (perhaps to fetch the doctor out, which was something that you used to be able to do when somebody was ill enough!), you had to find a public call box or one of these telegraph offices.  Most other transactions would be less urgent and would be done with paper and pen, but the reliable postal system made more than one delivery a day.  Anything really urgent would be sent by telegram from a Post Office and delivered by messenger (my father did this by bike when he left school at 14) or via the railway's own system.  The GPO was already using teleprinters in main offices by WW2, and Dad moved onto maintaining them before he was old enough to volunteer as aircrew.   Even if you wanted a home phone installed you had to put your name on a waiting list, as you had to for a council house, and the wait would typically be a year.  We first had a phone in about 1960 (and had priority installation) because my father was on the emergency call-out list for any incident at a nuclear power installion.

 

My mother used to say that as a little girl (in the early 1930s) she had to recite something for her Sunday School (I think that's who it was for).  She spent a lot of time in a general store/sub post office, so she chose  A piece of text based around the then very common sign "You may telephone from here".  This blue enamelled sign was to be seen outside many sub-post offices,   Indeed until a couple of years, there was still such a sign outside a general store/sub post-office in Letchworth.

[Michael Hodgson]

4 hours ago, keefer said:

British railway Telegraph Code Words:

http://www.railwaycodes.org.uk/features/telegraph.shtm

 

 

The railways' phonetic alphabet was one of many.  For example

A for 'orses

B for Mutton

C for Thighlanders

D for Dumb

E  for Oar

F for Pheasants...

[Jeremy Cumberland]

G for Police.

 

I particularly liked

M for Sis

N for More Sis

[C126]

One dialled your exchange operator, and said, "I would like to place a Trunk Call to [X] exchange, number [1234]."  Last used at my hospital switch-board in the 1990's, which caused much reminiscence with the operator.  It was only a call to another library, so not urgent.

[csiedmo]

5 hours ago, Michael Hodgson said:

 

The railways' phonetic alphabet was one of many.  For example

A for 'orses

B for Mutton

C for Thighlanders

D for Dumb

E  for Oar

F for Pheasants...

These days I prefer

E for Rail

[The Stationmaster]

On 23/04/2024 at 10:26, keefer said:

History of the Electric Telegraph Company: 

https://distantwriting.co.uk/electrictelegraphcompany.html

 

British railway Telegraph Code Words:

http://www.railwaycodes.org.uk/features/telegraph.shtm

 

The latter contains some errors.  For example the notes in respect of 'Grove' implying it was originaly an SR code are incorrect it was a national code issued by the REC.  The word was directly derived from the name of the wartime LMS headquarters at The Grove, a country house near Watford and in later years a BR training Centre (various of us on RMweb attended courses there - a long while after the war!!).

[bécasse]

The Southern Railway wartime equivalent of The Grove was Deepdene House near Dorking (which remained in use for many years after the war as a railway accounting centre) and that lent its name to the telegraphic code DEEPDENE for trains conveying VIPs other than Heads of State.

 

Although it was a long while after the war that one attended courses and the like at The Grove, the classroom huts around the garden still sported their wartime camouflage paint.

[Janjy Giggins]

Thank you all - that's very helpful! My memory of the railways only goes back to the late 80s and early 90s, so this is very useful information. It sounds like for a station ambiguously dated between the 20s and 60s depending what I feel like running, if I put a couple of desks in the room and a mixture of telegraph machine and phones, that should work OK.

[doilum]

At Selby the telegraph office was located next to the station master's office. 

[The Stationmaster]

On 26/04/2024 at 20:30, Janjy Giggins said:

Thank you all - that's very helpful! My memory of the railways only goes back to the late 80s and early 90s, so this is very useful information. It sounds like for a station ambiguously dated between the 20s and 60s depending what I feel like running, if I put a couple of desks in the room and a mixture of telegraph machine and phones, that should work OK.

There might well be a small telephone switchboard of some sort in that period as there weren't much in the way of automatic exchanges serving smaller stations in the early part of that period.