Post by railtechnician on Mar 1, 2010 12:32:56 GMT
In the Towerman retiring thread Kentucky Tony asked the question!
I thought I'd get the ball rolling with at least one answer!
Well I never expected to retire at 52 and, without going into the details, I did exactly that drawing normal but somewhat reduced pension after 28 years service. My lifelong interests centred around computers and model railways though the model railway was sold off years ago.
I began my career as a telephone engineering apprentice with PO telephones in 1970 and thought that would be my lifelong career. In my seventh year I was disillusioned with the way that the PO was changing and how I had been pigeon holed into one segment of a field of exchange maintenance which was as appealing as a life sentence so I started again at the bottom with LT Signals (New Works) as a wireman, 1:1 scale model railroading!
I always thought that when I retired I might build another model railway properly signalled based upon LT/LU with proper lever frame(s), interlocking etc. What I never expected to do was to begin collecting telephones, having worked with them for 35 years at PO and LT/LU/Tubelines even in my days as a signal maintenance lineman. However, I had for some years been a member of nostalgic online groups such as GPO Telephones and Strowger and I began to read about the Collectors Net otherwise known as C*NET (USA) or CNet (UK). In 2004 a couple of collectors in the USA decided to try and link their preserved Strowger electromechanical telephones exchanges together via VOIP and that was the beginning of a growing worldwide organisation of telephone engineers and collectors. I retired in mid 2005 and after twiddling my thumbs for a year, having moved to the sticks and away from the rat race, I became interested in telephones all over again when a neighbour gave me a German telephone that she found in the bottom of a box of car boot bric-a-brac and had no use for. I restored it and began collecting phones, pretty soon I wanted to connect them together and bought an old office analogue electronic PBX and then two CNet members invited me to connect my preserved telephones to their preserved Strowger UAX (Unit Automatic Exchanges) exchanges. To do this meant building an Asterisk telephone server from an old computer using a Linux operating system and proprietary Digium open source telephony software. Each member's Asterisk server communicates with others using IAX2 protocol over TCP/IP, I was amongst the first ten collectors in the UK to be connected to the network. Since then we have more than doubled our membership in the UK and have members in Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, Austria, Slovenia, Netherlands as well as USA and Canada and have contact with potential members in several other countries. Between us we have a wealth of knowledge of national telephone and other communications systems and related private systems from the electromechanical age and have even managed to connect working exhibits in museums to our network, for instance I have an extension on the preserved exchanges in the Victoria telephone museum in Australia.
After some three years in the hobby I have some twenty PBX exchanges in my collection and more than 100 telephones from UK, USA. France, East & West Germany and Sweden and I have just built my sixteenth Asterisk server. I am still a Linux and Asterisk novice and I have plenty of old phones to restore with a TODO list longer than my career, the only thing I am short of is money, isn't everyone these days? No gripes here though, I couldn't be happier and one day I still intend to build a working model of a lever frame and some other bits and pieces which will by then be long obsolete at LU !
I thought I'd get the ball rolling with at least one answer!
Well I never expected to retire at 52 and, without going into the details, I did exactly that drawing normal but somewhat reduced pension after 28 years service. My lifelong interests centred around computers and model railways though the model railway was sold off years ago.
I began my career as a telephone engineering apprentice with PO telephones in 1970 and thought that would be my lifelong career. In my seventh year I was disillusioned with the way that the PO was changing and how I had been pigeon holed into one segment of a field of exchange maintenance which was as appealing as a life sentence so I started again at the bottom with LT Signals (New Works) as a wireman, 1:1 scale model railroading!
I always thought that when I retired I might build another model railway properly signalled based upon LT/LU with proper lever frame(s), interlocking etc. What I never expected to do was to begin collecting telephones, having worked with them for 35 years at PO and LT/LU/Tubelines even in my days as a signal maintenance lineman. However, I had for some years been a member of nostalgic online groups such as GPO Telephones and Strowger and I began to read about the Collectors Net otherwise known as C*NET (USA) or CNet (UK). In 2004 a couple of collectors in the USA decided to try and link their preserved Strowger electromechanical telephones exchanges together via VOIP and that was the beginning of a growing worldwide organisation of telephone engineers and collectors. I retired in mid 2005 and after twiddling my thumbs for a year, having moved to the sticks and away from the rat race, I became interested in telephones all over again when a neighbour gave me a German telephone that she found in the bottom of a box of car boot bric-a-brac and had no use for. I restored it and began collecting phones, pretty soon I wanted to connect them together and bought an old office analogue electronic PBX and then two CNet members invited me to connect my preserved telephones to their preserved Strowger UAX (Unit Automatic Exchanges) exchanges. To do this meant building an Asterisk telephone server from an old computer using a Linux operating system and proprietary Digium open source telephony software. Each member's Asterisk server communicates with others using IAX2 protocol over TCP/IP, I was amongst the first ten collectors in the UK to be connected to the network. Since then we have more than doubled our membership in the UK and have members in Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, Austria, Slovenia, Netherlands as well as USA and Canada and have contact with potential members in several other countries. Between us we have a wealth of knowledge of national telephone and other communications systems and related private systems from the electromechanical age and have even managed to connect working exhibits in museums to our network, for instance I have an extension on the preserved exchanges in the Victoria telephone museum in Australia.
After some three years in the hobby I have some twenty PBX exchanges in my collection and more than 100 telephones from UK, USA. France, East & West Germany and Sweden and I have just built my sixteenth Asterisk server. I am still a Linux and Asterisk novice and I have plenty of old phones to restore with a TODO list longer than my career, the only thing I am short of is money, isn't everyone these days? No gripes here though, I couldn't be happier and one day I still intend to build a working model of a lever frame and some other bits and pieces which will by then be long obsolete at LU !
