atcomsystems.ca/forum Forums Other TDM Phone Systems Antique Telephones What type of vintage device is this?

With the CN4A on the face, could it be from CN Rail's internal communication system? Something for a train or work crew to hook up to the lines besides the track and call into the yardmaster or dispatcher.

Because you said it was found in the Lake of the Woods area you probably know that the CN Sprague subdivision runs out of Manitoba by Hwy 12, (Vassar, Sprague etc) through the US under the Lake of the Woods and then back into Ontario.

I wonder if you send your pictures to the Winnipeg Railway museum at the Winnipeg CN station or the Prairie Dog Central steam railway, maybe one of their members can say if its a railway telephone set?

Great idea, Thanks very much

Well I shot off a email over to the Winnipeg Railway museum, hopefully hear something soon. I also would like to get an idea of value so I know to treat this unit with kit gloves or not. Any ideas whom I could contact for that??? I thank you all for all the help so far, this has been a cool journey

I LOVE IT when someone thanks us for all our co-operation, brain straining and hard work! g/c thank you very much from me and I'll betcha everyone else here! Please keep us posted on progress. :toast: John C.

If the WRM says its not railway telephone stuff, try asking the Winnipeg chapter of the Telephone Pioneers of America.

If it belonged to MTS I am sure they must have a retired outside plant guy as a member who will know what it is. https://www.411.ca/business/Manitoba/Winnipeg/Telephone-Pioneers-of-America/680339.html

Well after many emails and inquiries I am still no further along. None of the inquiries I have sent have been answered...bummer. Anyone else here got any ideas? I am really wanting to get some kind of ID on this unit.

You can try these people. They run the site I mentioned above.
Worth a shot

https://www.jitterbuzz.com/contact.html

Try sending an email Don McCarty of McCarty products inc (see the contact us icon). He writes a monthly column on outside plant repairs so he may have seen one of these in his years of service.

As far as what it is, I'm 100% sure that it is exactly what Ed said, i.e. a talk set (aka self-powered butt set) for use on 2- and 4-wire lines. "Talk set" is the most correct term for it, because it includes no provision for signaling (ringing). There is really nothing else that it can be, given the internal components. It is a very standard design.

As far as who made it and why, I'm 99% sure it was made by Northern Telecom for use by Phone Company technicians, meaning the customer (I assume) would have been one of the Canadian Phone Companies of the 1960's era.

Somewhere, in some dusty pile, there may be a printed "Practice" covering this unit. Living in the US, I've never even seen the Canadian equivalent of a BSP (Bell System Practices), but I have to assume that they do exist. I don't want to send you down another road to nowhere, but if you can find out that they do exist, and that an archive of them exists somewhere, you could get lucky. [Insert more disclaimers here, such as "Not Responsible For Hair Pulled Out In Frustration"].

The fact that it turned up at a lake cottage is interesting. It could have been used as an intercom or in conjunction with an Army style field phone, but this would have been unlikely given that it has no provision for signaling (outgoing or incoming). If the location was really remote, someone may have been using it on a phone line with a separate ringer. So-called "Toll Stations" were often insanely long (100 miles or more) and hand-cranked ring generators and local battery were the norm. The four-wire capability would have been superfluous in this case, because (I think) most Toll Stations were actually single-wire (ground return) circuits. All of my conjecturing in this paragraph relates to the "second life" of your phone - it definitely started out life as a piece of portable test/maintenance equipment and only went on the see the Great North Woods after it retired from that gig.

Jim
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Speaking from a secure undisclosed location.

Update to my final paragraph above (the conjecture paragraph):

I just did a little digging on Ringdown Toll Stations, and I saw a reference that leads me to believe that some Toll Stations may have in fact been four-wire lines (with analog repeaters).

Interesting...

Jim
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Still trying to reach "Drakesbad No.2" (I think it is/was in Nevada)