2C2 Panel Phones with KS-19426 Enclosures Found!!!

[ESalter]

Hi Everyone-

Yesterday was a rather interesting day.  It started out like any other more or less.  We just moved into a new apartment at the beginning of the month.  We still have the old one until the end of December, so we still have a few things left there and we need to clean the place.  My girlfriend and I went over to our old place yesterday afternoon to move some of what was left and to start cleaning.  I was vacuumed one of the bedrooms.  When I was done I noticed I had just missed a call on my cell phone.  It was from my buddy that pulls out payphones.  I called him back and he told me he pulled out an interesting setup yesterday that he had never seen before and thought I might like to save it.  He said there were two enclosures side by side and they stuck out at like a 45 degree angle and they took panel phones.  I immediately pictured those box type enclosures that could be mounted flush into a wall where the phone mounted inward at a 30 degree angle or so and a perforated stainless acoustic panel came in from the other side to meet the inner edge of the phone.  

So, we scrambled over to his house to get them.  They were still in the back of his truck.  He opened the back door and I could tell right away they weren't what I had originally thought.  He said he was careful to save all of the hardware for me as they had to disassemble them to get them off the wall.  Both enclosures are separated, the phones are loose(obviously), and the black triangular piece you can see in the back is separate as well.  Both enclosures are dated April 1969.  One of the phones is dated January 1970, the other is October 1970, both phones are early 2C2 types.  It's incredibly hard for me to believe these were still in service this late.  He told me they came out of a shopping mall.

This one came completely out of nowhere, goes to show you never know what can happen.

---Eric

[poplar1]

Eric, congratulations on another find!

Since there are no instruction cards, maybe these had been disconnected and abandoned years ago. Lots of equipment like Key Systems and PBXs got left behind. I'm surprised that pay phones were left by Bell companies.

Are some working pay phones in your area still Bell-operated? In my area, BellSouth got out of the pay phone business several years ago. They sold some of them "in place" to the current users and sold about 140,000 phones to a scrap dealer in Birmingham, AL (Palco). Many of these had been modified with the "smart boards" that made them work on regular lines.

[ESalter]

I have seen lots of abandoned enclosures, but very, very few still have phones in them.  US West then Qwest operated these until somewhere around 2006? when they then sold that business to a different operating company.  These were actually in service still until Monday morning when they were pulled out.  He took out the instruction cards and upper lock from both phones before I got them.

---Eric

[DavePEI]

Eric:

You are one lucky man. These are fantastic. We don't see many panel phones up here, though NE did make them. The first panel phone installations in Canada were at Expo '67, but they never did become common place across the country. Oddly enough, you can see one of the first Canadian ones in a video:

"Ain't No Mountain High Enough" by Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xz-UvQYAmbg

This was filmed on the day that my high school class visited Expo 67 in Montreal . It was filmed in front of the Ontario Pavilion with one of the many modernistic  Bell Canada/Northern Electric panel payphone kiosks at the fair in the background.

Great find! Brings back memories.

Dave

[poplar1]

The Northern Electric ones had separate slots for 5c, 10c and 25c and had a modified 3-slot 233H  inside.

[DavePEI]

The Northern Electric ones had separate slots for 5c, 10c and 25c and had a modified 3-slot 233H  inside.

Actually, correct only for the earlier ones. The later generation of NE panel phones, the QSD series, was a single slot fortress type (QSD-100A, QSD-2100A). The one shown at Expo in the video was the earlier version with three coin slots as you say.

Dave (See T9 - 1972 Catalogue listing below)

[ESalter]

That's very interesting!  I never knew NE made them with separate slots for the coin types.  Learn something new every day!

I'm very excited about both the enclosures and the phones.  I can't wait until I have the time to clean all of it up and get everything put back together again.  Then the hard part - finding a good place to hang it on the wall!  I picked out a good spot here in my apartment, however my girlfriend disagrees.

I'll take/upload more photos as I work on all of these.

---Eric

[DavePEI]

That's very interesting!  I never knew NE made them with separate slots for the coin types.  Learn something new every day!

Yes, I think a lot of people didn't know that. If you look over Tammy's shoulder in the video, you will see the 3 slots on the phone.  As David W. said, the early ones were like that, and as he said, based on the 233 design. Later, in 1972, the single slot design was introduced. I remember seeing some of the later ones when I was living in Toronto in large business lobbies and in the bank tower lobbies. I don't think I ever saw one of them here on the Island - mostly Centurions here, in the 70s still mixed with 233s! Of course the 233s were soon phased out, and now even the Centurions are going, and even some of the much later Millenniums are now disappearing thanks to cell phones.

You have a couple of real gems there, Eric! Enjoy them! I think, even with the WE ones, they are pretty scarce.

When I saw yours it sure reminded me of seeing that phone at Expo 67. We were there the same day that they filmed the video, and I actually played with that phone after the filming was done. Somewhere in our old photos, I should have a photo of me standing by that very phone shown in the video.

Dave

[ESalter]

First, a huge thanks goes out to our very own Vern Potter for sending me a pair of gray WE payphone handsets to put on our new panel phones.  I received them yesterday and on Wednesday I acquired an "old" dial assembly also.  The dial assemblies in these phones are newer EMD dials, cheap, plastic, all electronic, and plug together.  The dial assembly I came up with is an old one that appears to be refurbished in 1999.  It has a zinc housing instead of plastic, has the screw terminal block instead of a circuit board and plugs, etc.  It looks like the big thing changed when it was refurbished was the hook switch switches.  It has a set of roller micro switches now.

Anyway, I picked one of the phones yesterday, tore everything off of it, replaced the dial assembly and gave it a gray handset.  I stuck a couple instruction cards in it just for the photo.  I think it looks pretty nice!  I tested it also, it worked on the first try(as a phone, anyway).  We hooked it up to our "coin trunk simulator" and couldn't get that to work.  The controller saw we deposited coins, it saw the phone pulse out how much money we put in in nickel increments, but it wouldn't bank or return the coins, the coin relay never went.  My dad programmed the controller based on a 1C1 phone with a 1A totalizer and such.   We think the 1D2s(or at lease these two) don't show the coins present signal like the 1C1 does.  The controller looks for that before it operates the coin relay, so if that signal isn't there, it doesn't do anything.  One of these days coming up we're going to bypass that step of the program and try it again.

---Eric