Railway Telephone Circuits Help

cin88 said:

Boxes also have at least one conventional landline phone, most of mine have two for reasons that have never been explained to me. My theory is one was previously the BR internal line and the other a GPO/BT line. The GSMR can also dial out onto the BT network if need be.

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BR lines could dial out onto the BT network by dialling 9, although not all phones had "level 9" access. Most with level 9 could only dial local numbers, so the call would automatically drop out if you tried dialling a number beginning with a 0 or 1, but if you were important enough you might have national access. The problem was that incoming calls had to come via the BR operator, and I don't think all BR exchanges had 24 hour operator service. So your box may have been provided with a BT line so that you could be contacted direct, eg by the emergency services.

I think problems also started when BT went over to electronic exchanges with CLI. If you dialled 9-999 from a BR line, the number that the emergency services would see would be that of the BR exchange. If they tried calling back, they would get the BR operator, who would know nothing about your emergency call.

In some of the big BR strowger exchanges, at quiet times trainees would be put on monitoring the level 9 circuits. You would plug your techs phone into each circuit in turn, and listen in to the conversation. Some of the calls were quite explicit. At a suitable point, you would turn your microphone on and say something like "This call is being monitored, who is this speaking please". Cue call abruptly ending.

== Doublepost prevention - post automatically merged: 5 Aug 2026 ==

Merle Haggard said:

I attended The Grove once (not that I was ever high grade management!) and it had a great sense of isolation. Perhaps this was deliberate to focus attention on the course.

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Coming in the main entrance, as you walked up the long winding drive through the parkland, over the canal and past the pig farm, you certainly got the impression that it was in the middle of nowhere. But if you went out the back way, next to the Civil's School annexe, there was a good village pub within easy walking distance.....

Belperpete said:

/snip/

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Regarding 'The Grove'

Belperpete said:

Coming in the main entrance, as you walked up the long winding drive through the parkland, over the canal and past the pig farm, you certainly got the impression that it was in the middle of nowhere. But if you went out the back way, next to the Civil's School annexe, there was a good village pub within easy walking distance.....

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On the occasion I attended (for a week) there was a BR minibus service from the station. It was a Bedford CA type 'Utilabus' (I think that was the name) - a van fitted with side windows and basic seats. It was painted faded dark green and, possibly because of the low annual mileage involved, was even then an antique survivor. It dropped us right outside the entrance (rather like Fletch in Porridge so we were even less aware of the environs. And we were kept on assignments (there was a BR name for that, I can't remember) until about 20.30.

Belperpete said:

On the GPO, if you wanted to call a phone not on your local exchange group, you almost always had to get the operator to make the call for you. In some cases, there were special local codes for dialling a nearby exchange, but you needed to know that such codes existed, or look in the telephone directory to see if one existed for where you wanted to call.

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You could chain these local-local codes, it was possible to get all the way from Cambridge to the N outskirts of London for the price of a local call - though the quality was not brilliant.

This was the basis of early "phone hacking" which was extensively practised in the late '60s and '70s. A former colleague of mine was proscuted by the GPO for "abstraction of electricity".