Do not forget that to go to touch tone in your exchange the telephone company had to change the dial tone so it would work on both pulse and DTMF.
We had a problem that sometime touch would not work. After many arguments with repair service went to phone exchange and told technition that one or more incoming registers would not take a touch tome. Called me the next day and said he found the bad register. Said they had 20 in the office and of course it was # 20 that had the problem . Said he was beginning to think I was wrong and a few other nasty comments to a co worker.
Backus My 88 year old friend started out on the mail trains in the 1950's. He was a substitute, usually working on the Great Northern out of St. Paul but also worked on the NP and the Milwaukee Road He worked trains to Chicago, Winnipeg, Williston, ND, and a number of other places. His first trip actually took him through his home town of Bemidji, MN on the run to International Falls, MN. He stayed on the mails trains until they ended in the late 1960's. His trips were out and back so he would overnight and then return the next day. As a federal employee he did carry a pistol which was issued to him at the beginning of each run. He still has his original RPO badge and has told me lots of really great stories.
My 88 year old friend started out on the mail trains in the 1950's. He was a substitute, usually working on the Great Northern out of St. Paul but also worked on the NP and the Milwaukee Road He worked trains to Chicago, Winnipeg, Williston, ND, and a number of other places. His first trip actually took him through his home town of Bemidji, MN on the run to International Falls, MN. He stayed on the mails trains until they ended in the late 1960's.
His trips were out and back so he would overnight and then return the next day. As a federal employee he did carry a pistol which was issued to him at the beginning of each run. He still has his original RPO badge and has told me lots of really great stories.
Some years ago we had a forum member who called himself dakotafred. He had worked on mail trains sorting mail. He was also an author of novels with railroad settings. I' sure he could (or could have) answer most all of these questions on RPO's. I hope he's still with us.
And on the phones, I do remember the rotary dial and have one in the basement that still works too. Southwestern Bell replaced our hard wired phone with a jack to plug in the wall, because they would no longer be coming to repair stuff like they used to do. If it is the wires to your house, they will take care of it, but inside you are responsible. We had Sterling as a prefix later changed and no area codes. Mom's aunt/uncle still lived on old family farm near St. James, MO when we would visit. They had a special ring for their phone and if Aunt Mary wanted to hear the latest gossip, she would pick the phone up even if it was not her ring. A true party line. Dad got rid of our party line we had for years, because someone had a bunch of kids and could never use the phone. Ask them to hang up which they did, but a soon as call was finished, the busy signal once again. So he told SBC to set us up with a single line. Touch tone was much easier to use and faster. I still have my land line as it will work when everyone's else's gadgets go down. And I do not have it tied into internet or my TV, It is a bundle, but keep them separate, one goes and takes the rest with it. This way if one goes it is only that item. Lots of changes over the years.
Our neighbor was a RPO worker and he told stories of how hard it was to sort the mail if the train was running fast. Getting hit by heavy bags of mail that fell from the shelves. And he always carried a gun on the job as someone mentioned. They knew how to stop anyone trying to break in the mail car door but that info he never shared. His father was a Frisco engineer and so was his wife's father. The mail seemed to be delivered faster and better than it is now. We lost our carrier of 15 years until he retired a couple of years ago. No one seems to stay long on the route, a few months and then we are back to subs again. I was getting mail at 8 and 9 pm but it is better now. Have heard they are short staffed as a lot of people did not return after Covid.
On one of my co-op stints on the PRR, I was assigned to a C&S line gang's camp train in Greenfield IN. We had a phone connected to the wayside message line. At night, I could ring up (crank) the Columbus OH switchboard operator who would plug me to a carrier line to Cincinnati where the Cincinnati Operator would dial up my girl friend (now wife of 61 years) and I could talk for a while. On a later assigment, I was assigned to Columbus OH & after work, I would go to the switchboard room which was a three position plug board, and since there was only one operator, I could sit at an empty bay and plug into one of the Cincinnati channels and do the same. There were four channels to Cincinnati and I could see if they got busy, so I knew I was not blocking anyone. I still wonder how I was able to talk over 100 miles over #9 copperweld wire. Also, one night, when I was in Greenfield, a thunderstorm was going on and the arrestor (protector) located on the wall near me was sparking. Doing its job but I was in a wooden car and so I had no problem.
MidlandMike RKFarms And our first phone "number" was (I think) 3 longs and 2 shorts. Did your phone have a whistle.
RKFarms And our first phone "number" was (I think) 3 longs and 2 shorts.
Did your phone have a whistle.
Hand crank ringers. They were used on railroad 'block lines' between Train Order stations in the days after telegraph and before radio. There were line of road telephone facilities put in place for train crews to be able to contact train order operators about their being stopped.
Never too old to have a happy childhood!
RKFarmsAnd our first phone "number" was (I think) 3 longs and 2 shorts.
It seems the mail was quicker back in the old days, but maybe thats just me. By the time I rode any trains there was not any obvious signs of any postal work being done.
And our first phone "number" was (I think) 3 longs and 2 shorts. Later we got 3397 as our first actual phone number. This was rural WC Indiana in the 50's. Calls to the nearest large town (Lafayette, 18 miles away) were long distance and very expensive on a farm budget.
Now we have high speed internet and pretty good cell coverage.
After ordering quite a bit online, I've noticed that location can affect shipping times for the USPS.
I live in the middle of the country. Orders from the west coast (California), southeast U.S. (Georgia, Florida), and central part of the U.S. (Texas, Colorado, Missouri) normally get to me in three or four days.
On the other hand, orders from the Great Lakes region and the northeast U.S. take the longest.
Right now, I am waiting on an order of wire from Chicago. The tracking shows it has been sitting in the McHenry, IL., post office sorting facility for six days. That's about normal on my orders from Illinois, Ohio, New York, and New Jersey.
York1 John
Just talked to a postal carrier. Informed me that the distribution center serving our local post office is getting the mail truck to our PO earlier enabling deliveries to come to home earlier. Have noticed that my local deliveries have gone from a 1330 time to a 1210 delivery consistenly the last couple weeks.
zugmann Overmod I don't think there is anything massively political in the USPS being directed toward process efficiency and savings ...really? I mean, c'mon. Between the pension mandates and all the changes and cuts that happened right before a very big event in November - you don't see anything political? Not even a little?
Overmod I don't think there is anything massively political in the USPS being directed toward process efficiency and savings
...really? I mean, c'mon. Between the pension mandates and all the changes and cuts that happened right before a very big event in November - you don't see anything political? Not even a little?
Of course USPS is rife with petty politics and gamed indicators of performance; so is Amtrak. But there's still a difference between objective efficiency and political expediency -- I dislike trying to discuss the latter on forums like these.
The "privatization" argument isn't wholly serious: it simply points out that the guaranteed first-class franchise isn't the great profit cash cow it was in years past, and making first-class privatization contingent on universal service might be an effective poison pill for our usual PSR sort of expedient capitalists interested in selective cream-skimming of markets increasingly less creamy at the cost involved.
His comment smacks of either naivete or an absurd form of revisionist history. Option three is preferable: a Pangloss optimism.
OvermodI don't think there is anything massively political in the USPS being directed toward process efficiency and savings
The opinions expressed here represent my own and not those of my employer, any other railroad, company, or person.
BaltACDWe are not seeing improved efficiency and profitability of USPS - we are seeing destruction of a service guaranteed in the Constitution.
That doesn't help the human issues of the pension amounts, funded or unfunded. But the Government has some experience now with solving the problems when entities too big to fail need to deal with their pension concerns...
daveklepper If I had done either of your capers, I wuld really regret it today, and certainly would nut boast of it. Yes, there are things I did when i was young that i am ashamed of today, but if I wished to discuss technology, I'd use anonmous souls. Was the crime of trying to pass a counterfit $25 bill any more seious than the capers you posted above? And you are, of course, not the only one. I did object to apublished story inovling theft of edible-drinkable (and delicious and cooling on a hot day) freight.
If I had done either of your capers, I wuld really regret it today, and certainly would nut boast of it. Yes, there are things I did when i was young that i am ashamed of today, but if I wished to discuss technology, I'd use anonmous souls.
Was the crime of trying to pass a counterfit $25 bill any more seious than the capers you posted above? And you are, of course, not the only one. I did object to apublished story inovling theft of edible-drinkable (and delicious and cooling on a hot day) freight.
Pretty sure that a "counterfeit" 25 dollar bill is not a crime, at least a federal crime. Since there is not and never has been a $25.00 bill, you can't counterfeit one.
Overmod BaltACD Despite the facts that mail has been off the railroads for over half a century. And will never, ever return -- even in resumption of the 1977 service where there is still a place for it at achievable scale... I don't think there is anything massively political in the USPS being directed toward process efficiency and savings; in fact I think they were doing reasonably well until things associated with the pandemic tripped them up. There have been periods in the past that gave me much more concern -- anyone remember the wacky abbreviation concerns we were supposed to use mandatorily to make their then-primitive OCR work? The concerns over automated sorting in the railroad context go beyond just the speed of OCR and its amount of rejects per hour. But I suspect many of the complicated concerns are already addressed with fixed sorting -- for example, the equipment that straightens mail dumped out of a sack, aligns it correctly facing the scan, etc. as well as handles the various sort outfeeds. I see no reason that could not be fit into the space available in a railborne vehicle, although perhaps articulated at some length, the time saving for certain classes of mail being perhaps as quick as much quicker bulk transport to and from a central sorting facility (a la the FedEx model). I'd like to see this become more efficient than delivery and pickup from a specialized center like Harrison (IIRC the thing that finished off bulk sort on the trains) but I don't think it would be.
BaltACD Despite the facts that mail has been off the railroads for over half a century.
And will never, ever return -- even in resumption of the 1977 service where there is still a place for it at achievable scale...
I don't think there is anything massively political in the USPS being directed toward process efficiency and savings; in fact I think they were doing reasonably well until things associated with the pandemic tripped them up. There have been periods in the past that gave me much more concern -- anyone remember the wacky abbreviation concerns we were supposed to use mandatorily to make their then-primitive OCR work?
The concerns over automated sorting in the railroad context go beyond just the speed of OCR and its amount of rejects per hour. But I suspect many of the complicated concerns are already addressed with fixed sorting -- for example, the equipment that straightens mail dumped out of a sack, aligns it correctly facing the scan, etc. as well as handles the various sort outfeeds. I see no reason that could not be fit into the space available in a railborne vehicle, although perhaps articulated at some length, the time saving for certain classes of mail being perhaps as quick as much quicker bulk transport to and from a central sorting facility (a la the FedEx model).
I'd like to see this become more efficient than delivery and pickup from a specialized center like Harrison (IIRC the thing that finished off bulk sort on the trains) but I don't think it would be.
The profitability of USPS is political when the politicans have decreed that USPS must guarantee the pensions of employees that have yet to be concieved let alone hired into the employment of USPS.
We are not seeing improved efficiency and profitability of USPS - we are seeing destruction of a service guaranteed in the Constitution.
BaltACDDespite the facts that mail has been off the railroads for over half a century.
Glad you put the motive of efficiency in quotations since it was directly related to a banned topic on here.
OvermodModern OCRs can be very thin -- think scanners with the heads stationary and document feed controlled, or modern camera-based systems with anamorphic lensing. You could easily fit 10-12 lanes of reasonably high-speed sorting into a typical RPO compartment... the issue then being (as CSS can probably state from experience) where the sorted outfeed gets directed. The traditional arrangement had pigeonholes at right angles to the axis of the car, whereas mechanical sort would want to keep as much on-axis as possible -- I expect with the mail going directly into labeled sacks and 'unreadable' items promptly diverted for proper attention, perhaps first with hand scan before careful scrutiny... I'd expect some way to generate and attach a machine-readable label to each such piece. I'd be much more concerned with the sorter mechanics on rough track than with effective OCR and address-information extraction...
You could easily fit 10-12 lanes of reasonably high-speed sorting into a typical RPO compartment... the issue then being (as CSS can probably state from experience) where the sorted outfeed gets directed. The traditional arrangement had pigeonholes at right angles to the axis of the car, whereas mechanical sort would want to keep as much on-axis as possible -- I expect with the mail going directly into labeled sacks and 'unreadable' items promptly diverted for proper attention, perhaps first with hand scan before careful scrutiny... I'd expect some way to generate and attach a machine-readable label to each such piece.
I'd be much more concerned with the sorter mechanics on rough track than with effective OCR and address-information extraction...
Despite the facts that mail has been off the railroads for over half a century.
USPS got it's version of EHH and mail sorting equipment is being scrapped 'to improve' the service. Of course mail clerks are also being eliminated and having overtime eliminated for the remaining clerks in the name of 'efficiency'.
Having trackable items sit in the same Postal facility for weeks is a more accurate demonstration of how USPS has been wrecked in the name of efficiency.
Modern OCRs can be very thin -- think scanners with the heads stationary and document feed controlled, or modern camera-based systems with anamorphic lensing.
Mail sorting has advanced a bit since 1970. Optical character readers are part of the sorting process now and it may be impossible to get the machinery to fit in the tight cross-section of an RPO.
Wonder with tech now what it is that a sorting machine could be sized and built to fit and be installed in a RPO?
When I worked a summer job at Chicago's Main PO in 1970, sorting of first class mail was beginning to be mechanized. Since RPO and HYPO clerks sorted mail by hand, you can see that those operations were reaching the end of the line. Sorting machine operators were a grade higher than other clerks, giving an incentive to master that operation. The machine sorting was much quicker than by hand.
Rail Post Office (RPO's) workers were employees of the U.S.P.S., not the railways. They were trained and salaried as any other clerks, only they boarded their train, usually toward midnight, and 'clerked' the mail en route. I worked with a guy that did Pittsburgh to St. Louis through Cincinatti. The trains effectively did what the big semis do today delivering mail to the bigger offices. It was a very effective set up. AND FASTER!
NKP guy Today one can call everyone anywhere in the USA for free, no matter how long one talks. Utterly amazing to this boomer
Today one can call everyone anywhere in the USA for free, no matter how long one talks. Utterly amazing to this boomer
I was born in 1982 and it still takes some time for me to remember that I can largely call anyone, arbitrarily, for $0.
We were the only household in my family that lived in the 586 exchange of our area code. The rest of our family (and most of my friends) lived in 352. 586 could call 352 without penalty, but 586 was long distance to 352 numbers. The logic of this, of course, is nonexistent. Therefore, it was established that a code be implemented. If our phone rang once and then stopped, that was my mom's parents. Two was her older brother. Three was her younger brother. My friends were not assigned a code, but would merely say their name and immediately hang up. We would then return the call to the party that wished to speak to us.
I'm not sure when the phone company discontinued this, but it was still in place when dad came home one Saturday afternoon with cell phones for mom, my brother, himself, and I in 2002.
NKP guyDave, I have to say, I resemble that remark. (wink) If you look again at my post, I pointed out I wasn't the person who did this. In fact, the thief lived down the hall in my dorm. You raise a great issue, though. First, in principle, the theft of a long-distance phone call worth $2.25 is no different from any other kind of petty theft. It's no different from using a counterfeit $20. By the way, that $2.25 phone call in 1966 would cost $16.80 today...close to the $20 Mr. Floyd lost his life over. Now, in my post I wasn't boasting, so much as I was recounting. At the time, I found the situation hilarious, even though I knew it was theft. After some 50 years I no longer find it hilarious, but I don't see it as a big deal, either. It's a sin I'm sure the Ancient of Days has forgiven a long time ago, even if he hasn't forgotten it.
If you look again at my post, I pointed out I wasn't the person who did this. In fact, the thief lived down the hall in my dorm.
You raise a great issue, though. First, in principle, the theft of a long-distance phone call worth $2.25 is no different from any other kind of petty theft. It's no different from using a counterfeit $20. By the way, that $2.25 phone call in 1966 would cost $16.80 today...close to the $20 Mr. Floyd lost his life over.
Now, in my post I wasn't boasting, so much as I was recounting. At the time, I found the situation hilarious, even though I knew it was theft. After some 50 years I no longer find it hilarious, but I don't see it as a big deal, either. It's a sin I'm sure the Ancient of Days has forgiven a long time ago, even if he hasn't forgotten it.
I also had a day of guilt when shortly (in 65) after moving into my first house, I wired an extension bootleg phone (with ringer disabled) into our basement. My wife objected saying that this sent the WRONG message to our children. I agreed and that phone was put in storage. Later when we moved into our 2nd house in '78, I had the Bell installer wire it for phones in each room. He advised me that by paying for a leased phone in each room and then, after a month, return those I didn't need and for the cost of an extenion for a month, a room would be wired for a significantly lower cost than just wiring an extension jack. I think he got points for selling extra extension phones. Of course, after the Judge Green split up of the AT&T monopoly, Every changed. I've got some stories of working with the telephone companies in Illinois and the time I filed a complaint with the Illinois Commerce Commision on them. But pm me if you are interested.
I said this morning -- although it didn't post -- that it was amusing that having built the device, I never once actually used it to make a toll call 'for free'. (And that included testing to be sure it worked on a suite phone as well as a regular 'pay phone' line!)
Having said that, there is the same sort of cachet attached to making free payphone calls that there is to speeding. Both are nominal crimes, both clearly contrary to applicable law and morality, but often engaged in and sometimes a bit glorified. In a sense this is because the individual 'exploits' are so small, and often nominally victimless as things turned out. But of course that's little excuse in fully moral argument...
Something I learned 60 years ago is also applicable. When I was a sophomore in AP chemistry, I was probably far from alone in investigating certain chemical syntheses and experiments, such as filling lab drawers with Bunsen gas through the sockets for the overhead glassware supports and lighting it through the socket hole, to produce 'drawer experiment' critical-mixture surprise, or bubbling gas through soapy water to produce 'Hindenburgs'. One thing I thought was clever was that if you filled a beaker with a mixture of carbon tet and alcohol, stuck in a paper towel, and lit it, you had a nifty and cheap gas weapon. Fun to describe it to your lab neighbors, too...
...until one who thought he was brighter than he actually was decided to build one and test it out in the open lab. My first inkling of this was when I turned around and saw sheets of translucent gas pouring up from a beaker with a flaming towel sitting in it. Best I could do was to hold my breath and go back to the rear corner of the lab to turn the exhaust fan on, and dump the beaker in the sink -- strange the culprit couldn't be bothered to do that before running away. To this day it's a wonder nobody else in class in that rather large, multiple-story building wasn't injured or worse.
It took a hurricane to teach Langmuir this lesson. Interestingly, both of us learned it about the same.
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