atcomsystems.ca/forum Forums Wiring - Telecom Carriers - Trunks & Services Telecom Service & Providers Party Lines

Looking through a few BSP's...setting up the ringer for "party lines" crops up a lot.

What exactly is a party line?

The old rural 8 party lines were the most common. I don't know if there's any left or not, doubt it. There's still two party lines, but I'll bet there isn't too many of them left either.

Thanks Bill, but what are they?

Ok, I got it from Wiki. So, up to eight customers could use the same loop? That's less overhead for the Telco for sure.

with no privacy , you pick up your phone and you join any call in progress. when you heard someone pick up you where supposed to try to end your call ASAP so as to give them the line

each party would be assigned a separate bell frequency and the CO would send a ring signal by frequency so as to ring only the phones at the dialed subscriber

that's one reason you find a lot of 500 and 2500 sets with the bells disconnected when someone was (illegally ) adding a extension

(I have a ring generator in the warehouse that rings all the frequencies )

they had party lines around here until the mid 90's

Less overhead, perhaps but a troubleshooting nightmare. A minor wiring issue at any one of the eight locations would knock everyone out of service. This meant that the telco had to roll a truck to locations that could easily be miles apart. Also, the phones had to be telco-issued with the proper ringer frequency/setup, so there was no such thing as customer provided equipment. Actually, when people tried to do their own wiring or provide their own phones, they screwed things up for everybody.

When I was young we had a party line and used regular phones no special ringer. Each person had their own ring sequence ours was 2 long and a short the next door neighbors was 4 short rings. The bad part was you heard every ring the good part was if you were at the neighbors house you could answer your own ring.

Here in Bell country we didn't use frequency, it was positive & neg tip and pos and neg ring. So you'd hear two rings your's and your partners. So party 1 would be pos tip and get 1 ring and party 4 (1's partner) would get pos tip with 2 rings. Using freq all would get one ring. What Merritt discribed we had when I was a kid and I believe those were 10 party lines.

Two party is just tip party and ring party and are usually on bridge lifters.

now that I think about it maybe that was all AE (GTE) stuff I was working on with the frequency ringers

Pick up the phone and join any call in progress! HA! Wow, I definetly can see how that would be a problem, ten times more today then it would back in the day, since I find people on the whole less courteous today then in the past.

I would have to knock down my neighbours door to get them off the phone.

North and ITT both used frequency ringing and up to 10 parties on a line. Still have some "Golden Tone" ringers by ITT somewhere.....

And there were 2 types of frequency ringing. Harmonic and decimonic. Decimonic was (I think) 10, 20, 30, 40, 50, and 60 htz. Harmonic was 15, 30, 45, and 60. (Again, I think) And you could get really crazy, or so I was told. Use decimonic with Ringing tip to ring, tip to ground and ring to ground. (But isn't tip supposed to be ground?) That would be, supposedly, 18 parties! Altho the current drain would be huge, because even the wrong frequency bells would absorb some power.

John, technically all frequency ringers were considered "harmonic"....and, yes, depending on the spacing of the frequencies there were different names. Try 20, 30, 40, 50, and 66 1/3 for the fun of it....and with a positive ground C O it rang to ground with no problem....10 parties.

And don't forget the magneto lines....1/2 price for one side ground to talk over, full price for a full copper pair.

Ask SOB (Sweet Old Bill) about leaving the barbed wire gate open and the party line going dead. :rofl:

Wouldn't life be made simpler if the phones had bandpass filters?

Actually our cottage is still on a 4-party line, with ours the only one left on it. Therefore we have a "private" line for 1/2 the price. BTW, a faster dial-up speed that I can get in the the "city" by far on any of my private lines.

Merritt -

You might have been working off a manual (cord) board.

I remember in the '50s and the early '60s up in the Catskills (the Hebrew Himalayas) there were umpteen-party lines - all working off a manual CO. You picked up the phone and got "Hello Central". Madge or whatever her name was had a list of how many longs and shorts and in what order to ring your phone.

Sam

"..........(the Hebrew Himalayas)"

:rofl: :rofl: :rofl:

I've never heard the Catskills called that but it certainly makes sense
Sam, you are too funny!

Way, way, way off the thread....

Sam, is that the Poke-in-the-Nose Mountains????? That is what I heard the 'Joas-ey boyus call it....

:rofl: :rofl: :rofl:

Ken -

The Poconos are in PA. The Hebrew Himalayas (Remember the movie "Dirty Dancing") are in upstate NY (Sullivan County) about 2-3 hours from NYC.

Before there was Air Conditioning and during the years of "Restricted" hotels in the North East, the Catskills were very popular with downstate folk. Too much food and lots of entertainment. A lot of top comedians got their starts there.

Sorry for being off thread. I still think it was a manual board.

Sam

Did someone say NASCAR? ...oops, I didn't mean to be off topic.

Professor "NASCAR on the LEFT Coast" Shadow

Now how would you dial another subscriber that is on your line?

Am I correct in thinking that if you have your receiver off hook to dial the number, the line is tied up and the Co won't send the ring sequence through.

The only way I could see it working is that the call would go through after you hung up and you then got a ring back when the called party answered?

You would receive a message that says "You have called another party on your line. Please hang up, allow sufficient time for your party to answer, then pick up your receiver and talk".

The called party would hear a tick tone indicating that they should wait for the calling party to pick up.

you still get that here , dial your own number and it rings when you answer

"you have called a party on your own line "

evan though its a private line

The Queens County [New York City] phone directory still has the warning that State law requires party lines be yielded in an emergency. Up to the early 90's,the Nassau and Westchester county directories listed rates for two party lines and the Suffolk county directory for two and four party lines [Suburbs of New York City].
And of course one of the most famous party lines of all times must be the two-party line shared by Doris Day and Rock Hudson in 'Pillow Talk'. It seems kind of unlikely that in 1960's Manhattan, party lines would be used for two luxury apatments as depicted in the movie.

In the late '60s and early '70s in NYC there was such a shortage of OSP that NY Tel was still offering party lines. THe wait for repairs was also horrendous. Things were so bad that the PSC refused to allow them to issue any new products (Picturephone was what they were asking for at the time) until they cleaned up their act.

Sam

there are still party lines in quebec wow, bell forced my aunt off a party line up in l'annonciation.

I have customers to this day that at times have this problem

How does REN enter into party line service?

If you can't have more than a ren of 5 in a house how did it work sending ringing current with up to 8 different customers all over the place. I don't think party line customers would be all same street neighbours or would they?

Also could you have extention phones with a ringer in you house if you had a party line?

Never having seen a party line I find this topic interesting.

With frequency ringing it wouldn't since you'd only ring on the correct frequency. As far as Bell goes you'd be using 1/2 the REN since you're ringing to ground. So two parties times 1/2 REN would equate to having 10 sets (bells) on a single party line. Than take into account the range extenders, carriers, subsets and other things in the field REN was really no factor.

Where it became a problem was when we went from party line to private in the deep rural areas. Now the guy who had 8 phones and a couple loud bells on his ranch had to have dial long line units to boost the ringing current.

Back in the 1970's (before the Bell divestiture) you had to pay the phone company an extra fee (monthly) for each telephone in your house. The phone company "owned" them and rented them to you. It was illegal to connect your own phone. Where I grew up, most houses only had a couple of phones.

As a teenager, I had my own party line installed in my bedroom. At that time, people were installing their own phones with the ringers disconnected. I remember people telling me that if your phone rings, the phone company can tell, :nono: and will charge you extra for that phone.

Very true. It was very easy to determine the number of ringers connected through a simple capacitance test from the central office.

We used to get extra jacks installed for less than $3.00 each. How did we do this you ask? We would rent several extra sets when the service was connected. Bell would install them anywhere you wanted, anticipating the residual rental income. After a month or two, we'd turn in the sets and have them taken off the bill. The jacks remained in place and we would just provide our own sets.

Before anyone gets upset, I learned this trick from a New Jersey Bell installer!

When my folks moved back to KC in 1949, they got a 2-party line. About 1957 my dad picked up the phone and discovered that we finally had a 'partner party'. Since the union had just settled a strike, after only 3 days (!), he was feeling pretty wealthy. He called SWB and we became a high-falutin' private party! Those folks were lucky, 1 teenager and two 'preteens' in our house could have made life pretty rough, I guess.