On a trip to Austin texas visiting people I haven't seen in years.

One old friend does repairs for music amp using tubes. He also does occasioanl radios and other tube equipment repairs because nobody else fixes that stuff anymore.

I was impressed that he had one of those old tube testers that used to be in every 7-11 40-50 years ago.

He hasn't come across any railroad radios but has fixed an old police radio for a state highway patrol police car restoration.

I was wondering if in the railway preservation field peiple have experiences/needs with this kind of equipment?

Railroad Radio use is a neglected area of both railroad scholarship and interpretation in railroad museums, which is suprising in that it facilitated a major shift in work rules and the overall culture of railroading.

Does anybody have radio equipment in their collections or plans to display radios with restored equipment?

Tom Cornillie

Tube worship is possibly as bad a "cult", if not even worse, than steam fanaticism. If you find the right guys (and one of them is my former roommate, ex-RR employee, and DL&W fan), they'll drool at the chance to tackle the challenges in question. Of course, one would have to actually find one of the radios in question to repair..........

I thought the RR Museum of Pa. had at least some token presence of the PRR's inductive "Trainphone" system somewhere in their halls....

The San Francisco Maritime Park has Sparks, Waves and Wizards going for the least few years. In addition to a timeline for marine radio communication we have a complete and operational 4U unit from a World War II Victory Ship -- the Ryder Victory.

Yes, the guys who are into old radio are REALLY into it. As soon as it was realized we wanted to make the thing operational, these small group of hams jumped right in and did it. many of the Liberty and Victory Ship museums have groups operating in their radio rooms.

All this marine radio was morse code.

Did the railroads use it also? That is long before the current VHS stuff.

Ted Miles

The impression that I've gotten from RR telegraphy lectures was that the railroads never used Morse, possibly because they never really used radio telegraphy. (Is it even proper to refer to the radio broadcast of Morse as telegraphy? This may be a contradiction.) The Wabash at least, at whose HS convention I last heard such a lecture, seems to have converted directly from old fashioned wired telegraphy with RR code (which works in a fashion altogether different from Morse) to plain language radio. I don't get the impression that the railroaders on WRR were even required to know Morse. And it seems from what littel I've seen elsewhere that the Wabash was probably pretty typical in that regard.

Sincerely,
David Ackerman

Seems to me the use of tubes in rr car circuitry was not limited to radios. Did not a lot of (more modern - post 1950) passenger cars have electrical panels with various tubes either functioning as a sort of voltage regulator or somehow connected to the use of the batteries and charging of them?

Bob Kutella

One of the more interesting railroad radios that I have seen was a broadcast receiver that was in a heavyweight WP lounge car. It was a 32 volt DC radio. It used special tubes that would operate on 32 volts.

The same type of radio was used by farmers who had a Windcharger power system on their farms. 32 volts was commonly used in heavyweight passengers cars for lighting.

International Morse code is used on radio. Landline Morse code was used by telegraphers. The two codes have a family resemblance to each other.
Landline Morse code was modified to make it more suitable for transmission by radio.

A few amateur radio operators know Landline Morse code. They meet regularly on the air and communicate via radio using Landline Morse.

I know International Morse but can only recognize a few charcters transmitted in Landline Morse.

fk

A little-off topic, but an explanantion.

Tube technology is still alive, but like emulsion film compared to digital photography, is a source of much discussion in the music industry. I admire Hume's friend who is one of a slowly dying breed of technicians. Tubes, ( like flash-bulbs) are no longer being made in the U.S. Many musicians ( especially guitar players) prefer "tube" amps, and the new wave of digital amps, although highly-touted, are being perceived with a jaundiced eye by many music professionals. Many tubes today are imported from the Soviet Union (Sov-Techs) or Korea. There is much discussion of the competency of these compared to the old US manufactured tubes. Therefore, any tubes that are found today are highly coveted. Recently I was in an abandoned warehouse adjacent to our restoration facility where we found an old tube radio home-base in a trailer. Our communications guy was ecstatic at the discovery of this unit which had approximately 15 tubes in good condition.

One of Jon's (the tube amp fixit person) activities and sources of income is to take old tubes and read their actual capacities (capciatance, inductance, whatever?). He puts them in boxes with the tube tester's outputs written on them. He said in some cases you have two of the same kind of tube in an amp, or whatever, and you want them the same, or balanced (Greek to me).

I have an old cabinet Atwater Kent radio that belonged to my grandfather. I had the cabinet restored, and the radio seemed to work, but not very well (it lit up, made noise and got one station). My father-in-law was an old radio fixit man. He found out one of the (big) tubes was bad, and got me a replacement (over $100 if I remember). I didn't tell tell him but the radio still works about the same.

I repair and rebuild antique radios. Also build and rebuild vintage audio equipment, and sometimes build my own amplifiers.
I've been in electronics off and on since the mid '60s, and was in amateur radio (ham radio) for a number of years.
I'm pretty familiar with vacuum tube circuitry. Old tubes from western countries are easy to obtain, and only a very few, mostly for audio, are expensive. Most can be had for under ten bucks, even on ebay. Cheaper from commercial tube sellers.
The Russian tubes are improving rapidly in quality, and those made in St. Petersburg in the former Svetlana plant, now SED, have always been top quality and still are. However, very few types of vacuum tubes are still being manufactured anywhere in the world. Mostly, those that are are mostly for audio purposes, although the monitor on your computer is a vacuum tube unless you've gone to a flat screen. A few vacuum tubes are still being manufactured in the USA, too.

If an old vacuum tube railroad radio were found, and if it were desired to rebuild it to working contition, it would not be all that difficult. No more so than any other piece of radio equipment. The nice thing about the older electronic equipment is that it does not contain integrated circuits, those little black squares soldered to circuit boards with part numbers a mile long. These little things are usually not obtainable as replacement parts. So, when modern electronic devices go fwippp, they're toast. Usually.

The older equipment has every component as a separate entity. Most of the older stuff needs every capacitor replaced, and most resistors. Coils very seldom are bad. Tubes are usually just fine unless they're broken. When one is found to be bad, they're almost always easy to obtain. Amazingly, vacuum tubes are very durable and are not necessarily the first source of trouble.

One question though, is what frequencies did railroads use in the early days? It might not be legal to use a vintage railroad transmitter today, depending on the frequencies it can transmit on. With no railroad signals on that frequency, it would also be sort of useless to restore a receiver to operating condition.

Regarding other uses of vacuum tubes in railroad equipment, I've been told that when the Milw. 261 was pulled out of Green Bay for restoration the original cab signalling equipment was still there, but pretty well ruined.
I'm told, but cannot verify, that there was a sort of control box in the cab behind the firemans seat. It is said that this control box contained a number of vacuum tubes.
I am more inclined to believe it contained relays in glass enclosures, but I cannot say one way or the other for sure.
If anyone can shed light on that, I'd be interested.
Mark D.

To add to the confusion, some relays use almost the same kind of socket and base (pins arranged in a circle) as vacuum tubes, and some observation lounge cars had commercial broadcast radio receivers.