(erielack) DL&W phoneboxes

[WSmith5957_@_aol.com]

Ah, yes, the phoneboxes;
      Almost completely forgotten in this day of radio & centralized 
dispatchers and NO agents at the stations. BUT in the 60s......you'd call 
Scranton from West Pittston & get permission to go North thru the spring 
switch at the end of doubletrack out onto the Susquehanna river bridge then 
reverse onto the Southbound maintrack so you could switch the Hitchener 
Biscuit Company in West Pittston or maybe reach down onto the West Pittston & 
Exeter for some MT hoppers. The two phoneboxes at West Pittston were 1. At 
the station on Delaware Avenue. When the agent was off duty, the phonebox was 
attached to the wall of the station trackside. &  2. Near the spring switch 
just mentioned at the end of York Avenue. (Both of these had a knife switch 
so one connected to the Dispatcher wire, the other end connected to the 
operator wire. If u connected to the operator wire & cranked the magneto, one 
of the DL&W Scranton telephone operators (all women) came on & asked who you 
wanted.
      When I worked in Binghamton in the mid 60s, the phones were used less & 
less, and someone decided that the phone in the #36 shanty (so called since 
it was near track 36 at the West end of Conklin yard) would look nice in 
their kitchen so they took the thing. The then trainmaster, Ed Clancy, was 
outraged & conducted a big search for the culprit, but to my knowledge never 
found out who had the old magneto phone. The best part of all this is after 
wasting God knows how much time snooping for the telephone theif by Mr. 
Clancy, I discovered that the communications department was simply throwing 
the old magnetophones away when they needed repairs rather than fixing them. 
We had backed our engine out over the ERIE bridge over the Chenango River 
just West of the downtown ERIE yard and lo and behold on the rocks at the 
edge of the riverbank was a pile of old wall phones. their walnut cases were 
cracked and shattered, the recievers were hanging on in some of them,  the 
mouthpieces were broken off ,  and you could see more of them through the 
swirls of shallow water in the river. There must have been at lest 20 of 
them. 
I haven't priced them in an antique dealers lately, but I bet any of you  
would LOVE to have one with its' little wooden board at an angle beneath the 
mouthpiece (for writing trainorders or instructions from the dispatcher. I 
know reproductions cost a fortune......how'd you like to have a REAL one??? 
Perhaps from the crossovers at LEHIGH, "Dispatcher, this's the headman on BH 
4, we need permission to crossover & setout a hotbox....."  Or as I used to 
do in West Pittston on the Bloom, just listen in to the dispatcher wire & 
hear "Dispatcher, Stroudsburg, # 5 by at 1102 PM" and just KNOW you were part 
of a real Railroad.
Regards to all,
Walter E. Smith

------------------------------