The LNER Encyclopedia

A friend has just acquired a load of train registers and the enclosed pic was tucked in the back of one of them. Can any of our signal specialists elaborate on it please. Is it morse sent by block instruments or codes for a separate telegraph circuit? I am a novice with signalling stuff.

Ay up!

That looks to me like a series of codes used on an omnibus telephone circuit. All the phones were connected to the same line and you rang the code to get one particular location.

Cheers BB.

That is exactly what it is.
I have a similar list but on officially issued paper for the circuit between Pickering and Gilling.

As already stated, "Circuit Card" of call signs for "Omnibus" telephone circuits. Are there any left in use? Mick.

Ay up, Mick!

The Worth Valley still use them.

Great to see something from my past times in Northumberland. It brought back a good few memories.

The omnibus circuits were completely open, so everyone heard the codes and could listen in if they so wished. If adjacent boxes wished to talk more privately a single bell on the block bell was often used to get the signalman at the adjacent box to the circuit phone. Even then there was a risk someone was listening in. This was the usual method to warn all about an insprctor on the patch

They were great for broadcasting information - All signal boxes could get the same information almost instantly

As well as inter-signal box circuits there were control circuits - linking back (in this area) to the Divisional Control Office in Newcastle. Mind in my experience anything north of Newcastle was pretty much ignored by higher authorities unless anything went badly wrong