[GreenKeys] Railroad use of Teletypes

[Harold Hallikainen]

Very nice! Those steam locomotives are impressive. It's also nice to see
model 14 and 15 equipment, just like mine!

They mention the advantage of unattended reception of messages with
Teletype. Lots of photos show punched tape, but not a lot is said about
it. Perhaps the use of punched tape was common knowlege. However, to me,
that is a huge part of what allowed for increased traffic on the telegraph
lines. The speed was not limited by the speed of the operator. Instead,
the line could continuously handle "tape speed." And, to me, torn tape
relay is an early form of packet switching.

A question on torn tape relay, when a new tape segment was passed to be
transmitted, was it spliced to the tape currently being transmitted so the
line would never sit idle, and no operator needed to load the next tape?
This, of course, is a FIFO buffer that handles bursty traffic input and
provides continous output.

Another interesting photo in the brochure was the people with carts
unloading a train car. Containerized shipping has sure changed that! I
remember seeing trains and trucks in the SF bay area in the 1960s or so
with containers marked SeaLand. That really revolutionized shipping.

Harold
https://w6iwi.org


On Thu, July 23, 2026 3:50 pm, Nick England via GreenKeys wrote:
> Here you go
>
>
> https://www.navy-radio.com/manuals/tty/sales/RailroadBrochure.pdf
>
>
>
>
> Nick England K4NYW
> Chapel Hill NC
> www.navy-radio.com
>
> On Thu, Jul 23, 2026 at 5:27 PM Jim Haynes via GreenKeys <
> greenkeys at mailman.qth.net> wrote:
>
>> 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
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>>
>>>>> Jordan Spencer Cunningham's GreenKeys Search Tool:
>>>>>
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>>
>>>>> 2002-to-present greenkeys archive:
>>>>>
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>>
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>>>>>
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>>
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>>>>>
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>>
>>
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>>
>>
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>
>>>> Jordan Spencer Cunningham's GreenKeys Search Tool:
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>>>>
>
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