[GreenKeys] Railroad use of Teletypes

[Jim Haynes]

On Thu, 23 Jul 2026, John Nagle via GreenKeys wrote:

> Re: Railroad use of Teletypes:
>
> https://youtu.be/xFnxFMOZtmk?t=237

Somewhere in the archives is a booklet about railroad use of
Teletype equipment.  Some sales engineer at Teletype did a lot
of homework to prodeuce that.

> Very few of the other pre-WWII designs still run. There was one
> guy who claimed to have a working Model 12.
>
Model 12s were the mainstay of amateur radioteletype in the early
years.  Seems like I heard that after WW-II organizations like
the New York police dept.  was replacing all their 12s now that
Model 15s had become available and Teletype was no longer supplying
spare parts for the 12s and now that 12s were wearing out.
12s were not well liked by the hams but they were all that could
be had.  One defect was that the 12s had receiving distributors
feeding multiple magnets and that created a lot of RF noise; but
then the original ham RTTY was mostly done on VHF.

Then in the mid 1950s the Bell System started getting rid of Model 26s
and that became the machine of choice for the hams.

Just a few days ago I ran across a picture of a young Bill 
Fulbright and his mother looking at news copy coming off a
Model 12.  Bill went on to be president of the University of
Arkansas and later one of the U.S. senators for Arkansas.
His mother was publisher of the Northwest Arkansas Times
newspaper.

  ---

 	"Ya can argue all ya wanna, but it's dif'rent than it was."
 	"No it ain't! No it ain't!  But ya gotta know the territory."
 		Meredith Willson, The Music Man