Electrical New 12 set up

[mikerezny]

Ahhh the mention of old telephones brings back the past ! Have you ever lived on a property with a party line? Maybe 10 properties on a single line your call was put through with a set of specific rings , yours maybe would be three long rings and two short etc.but anyone who picked up could hear your conversations, that’s why you went to town to talk to your bank manager

Hi,
I didn't live on a property. But I did join the PMG in 1969 and the Maryborough (QLD) district had many manual exchanges nearby (Tiaro, Bauple, Gunalda for instance). I visited many farms to repair phones and change batteries as well as doing maintenance on the manual switchboards.

There were many party lines out that way. One good thing about party lines was that one could call anyone else on the party line anytime for free.

The entire ground floor of the Maryborough Telephone Exchange was the trunk exchange jam packed full of female telephonists. No STD in those days all long line calls were all manually switched. A couple of years later one could dial direct but only to Brisbane.

One of my more boring jobs as a technician in training was manually reading and recording the call meters for every subscriber so the accounts department could send out the bills.

A few years later we clocked up heaps of weekend overtime changing these magneto phones over to automatic exchanges.

take care
Mike

 

[poor but proud]

Hi,
I didn't live on a property. But I did join the PMG in 1969 and the Maryborough (QLD) district had many manual exchanges nearby (Tiaro, Bauple, Gunalda for instance). I visited many farms to repair phones and change batteries as well as doing maintenance on the manual switchboards.

There were many party lines out that way. One good thing about party lines was that one could call anyone else on the party line anytime for free.

The entire ground floor of the Maryborough Telephone Exchange was the trunk exchange jam packed full of female telephonists. No STD in those days all long line calls were all manually switched. A couple of years later one could dial direct but only to Brisbane.

One of my more boring jobs as a technician in training was manually reading and recording the call meters for every subscriber so the accounts department could send out the bills.

A few years later we clocked up heaps of weekend overtime changing these magneto phones over to automatic exchanges.

take care
Mike

had two brothers in PMG TELECOM. TELSTRA elder one trained about the same time and you spent his time Queensland country and Lea in PNG ended his time as country manager in Roma ,younger one bris metro then Macquarie Island and Antartica ,and pine gap Nt. there was a lot of employment for young ladies in country towns in the telephone exchanges , when they went auto the local jobs dried up