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15.08.2020: New telephone hut

In the past few days, some members have taken advantage of the good weather to salvage a lineside telephone hut, which used to stand in Brunau-Packebusch on the Salzwedel - Stendal line. First the pictures of the sweaty action. The hut was first dismantled so that it could be safely carried and loaded onto the car trailer provided. After about an hour's drive, colleagues reached the locomotive shed in Wittenberge and put the hut in the workshop, where it was cleaned a little. Let's see, maybe the interior can be reconstructed.




Now, some will ask themselves what actually happened in such a hut, officially called "a telephone hut made of corrugated iron with inner wood panelling". This is a little-known chapter in railway history, but a rather interesting one:
For more than 100 years the German railways operated their own telephone network. Until 2010, the railways used their own telephone lines throughout the country, usually following existing railway lines and either underground or in the form of overhead lines laid over the typical telegraph poles.
At regular intervals, there were telephones in such huts from which one could make contact with the nearest operating station (and in some cases can still do so today). The corresponding telephones were housed along with other things in such huts, which were standardised in design and furnishings in the 1930s. The following drawing is taken from the corresponding guideline of 1.9.1933 and shows the interior.

The telephone set on the back wall of the hut dominates. This was usually a device equipped with a hand crank. By turning the crank, a magneto generated a small electric current in the telephone line. This current excited the telephone to ring in the station being called. The following picture shows such a telephone. It was published on the internet site https://www.motor-talk.de/bilder/toms-diskusions-ecke-g79846963/kapsch-kurbeltelefon-streckenfernsprecher-telephon-telefon-bahn-db-post-i209331312.html.

You could use Morse code to address the required station. For this purpose, three ring tones were defined, the length of which was determined by turning the crank on the phone: One turn produced a short ring tone at all connected paging stations, three turns produced a medium-length ring tone and ten turns of the crank produced a long ring tone. Each station in the immediate vicinity had its own Morse code, which was a combination of short, medium and long ring tones

Even today the system is still in operation on some routes. It has the advantage that you can fix up a phone at any place on the line. This is important, for example, when a work site is set up and you want to contact the adjoining signalling centres. For this reason, the current DB AG guideline 481.0101 "Instructions for wired telephone connections" still contains corresponding regulations on this.

Last weekend, we also carried out a major work assignment on our operational steam locomotives "Emma" and 50 3570 with a strong and well-rehearsed team in midsummer temperatures. After our last event in July, some minor repairs and maintenance work had become necessary and were carried out.



vehicles: 50 3570-4, Emma

Stichwörter: Infrastruktur

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