Train mail radio

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Writing compartment - recreated in the Nuremberg Transport Museum . On the table in front: the telephone.

The train post radio ( rail side), post side: train radio service , colloquially: train telephone , belonged to the public mobile land radio service . It was a service facility of the railroad that enabled travelers to telephone from the moving train to the fixed network of the post office and later to the telephone network . Train mail radio existed in Germany - with an interruption due to the Second World War - since 1926. This technology was replaced by the spread of mobile phones .

term

The term “Zugpostfunk” was chosen because other terms, such as “ Zugbahnfunk ”, were already used.

prehistory

Communication between travelers on a moving train and the fixed network was initially difficult. So that travelers could use wired telegraphy - and later telephone - , portable telegraph devices were carried on special trains, such as court trains, and later - when the technology was available - telephones that could be connected to the telegraph or telephone lines accompanying the route . To do this, however, the train had to stop.

In 1906 Telefunken made attempts to transmit messages from the moving train. They took place on the Royal Prussian Military Railway between Berlin and Zossen . About wireless telegraphy using Morse code was on medium wave sent. A coherer with a Morse code was used as the receiver . The range was twelve kilometers.

Commercial use

German Reichsbahn

On the same railway line , the company introduced in September 1918 Dr. Erich F. Huth GmbH, Gesellschaft für Funkentelegraphie in Berlin , conducts attempts to make phone calls from moving trains with the fixed network. The experiments were soon stopped because of the November Revolution. From 1920 onwards, CPGörtz AG was involved in this area: antennas that were mounted on the roof of a railroad vehicle and a wire attached to the telegraph masts along the route that was specially stretched for this experiment ensured transmission. The wireless transmission thus took place in the near field of the antennas. In 1922 the Reichspost began to be interested in the technology. There have been successful attempts on the Berlin – Hamburg route, and the Post decided to use this technology commercially. For this purpose, the Zugtelephonie AG was founded in 1925 , in which the Reichspost held a third. The company received the exclusive right to operate selected routes with train mail.

Technically, the solution looked as follows: At both ends of the line, a fixed station was built as a train switching center, in Berlin-Spandau and Hamburg-Bergedorf , to where the landline network of the respective major city extended. Each train switching point had a small tube transmitter and a receiver, the interfaces to the overhead line running next to the track. The antenna in the train, a 192-meter-long long- wire antenna made of four parallel wires, was laid over the roofs of two successive cars, about forty centimeters above the roof. It picked up the waves emanating from the overhead line and passed them on to the telephone on the train and vice versa. The chassis of the car got special ground connections to harmful ground . In train stations and other places where the overhead lines of the railway were interrupted and replaced by cables, special lines had to be laid for the telephone service and secured by block capacitors , which allowed the high-frequency currents of the telephone service to pass, but not the currents of the normal telegraph service .

On January 7, 1926, the first D-Zug pair between Berlin and Hamburg was equipped with the technology. She was in a compartment of a car 1./2. Class housed in the middle of the train. Inside, two washrooms were converted into speaking booths. By May 20, 1926, all five pairs of express trains on the route were equipped with telephones. Almost 40 calls were made every day, mostly from the train to the landline phone, although conversations could also be made the other way round. February 1, 1931, took over Mitropa the Zugtelephonie AG .

The conversations were mediated by hand. If someone outside of Hamburg or Berlin wanted to speak to someone on the train, they first had to be connected to the “Office” in Hamburg or Berlin, which then passed the connection to the train. The service was further expanded: from October 15, 1932, conversations between trains and also to ships at sea were permitted. Due to the Second World War, the service was discontinued after 1939.

Deutsche Bundesbahn and Deutsche Bahn

A network

The train mail radio was first used on the lines of the Deutsche Bundesbahn in 1955

introduced. These were connections of the mobile radio via the analog A network that had to be switched manually . The switchboard operator's job on the train was assigned to the train secretary, who had her place in the writing compartment . The corresponding recipient was therefore also in the writing compartment. In some trains this receiver became the “main station” and in a converted, neighboring washroom, which was also about the size of a telephone booth , an extension was set up in which the traveler could make calls. The radios in the passenger trains were bought and serviced by the railway. Devices of the type 516Y350a were used for this, a special version of the car phone 516Y339c , which was manufactured by Siemens between 1954 and 1960 . The long- distance express trains Gambrinus (F33 / 34), Schwabenpfeil (F23 / 24) and Rhein-Main (F31 / 32) as well as all TEE trains were equipped with radio systems.

In 1956, the Deutsche Bundespost acquired two of its own systems for the Cologne – Stuttgart – Munich connection , which it installed in rail mail cars .

The devices of this first generation were replaced from 1961 by the type B72y from TeKaDe , built until 1969. The device B72y was a version of the B72 , which was manufactured exclusively for the train mail radio of the Deutsche Bundesbahn. This in turn was replaced in 1970 by the TeKaDe model B95y. It was a railway-specific version of the B95 model . With the B95y, calls from outside the train were 31-3-90XX. The B95y was built exclusively for Deutsche Bahn until 1974 and then serviced, although the Post had been trying to reduce the number of participants in the A network since 1972. In order to bridge the period up to 1977/1978, the necessary post systems of the A network were still kept in operation.

The train telephone service had priority over the typing service for the train secretary. She and the employees of the fixed land radio stations had maps showing the locations of the train according to the timetable . Calls could be transferred to the entire telephone network of the Deutsche Bundespost. The fee for the call was calculated by the post office and communicated to the train secretary, who then billed it to the customer. The fee was made up of the long-distance telephone tariff for radio calls, a surcharge for switching of 3 DM (later increased to 4 DM) and sales tax . In 1962 around 420 calls were made per month on the train mail radio.

Should a passenger be reached from outside the train, this was also possible from August 1, 1961, when the B72y from TeKaDe was available. Here, too, the remote exchange had to hand-switch the call. The indication of the train number was sufficient for this . The train secretary called the passengers over the loudspeaker to take the call in the writing compartment. Before starting the journey, she set the telephone number for such incoming calls : The area code was 21-1-69XX and different depending on the direction of travel. So every train had its own number.

B network

Immediately before the A network was shut down in 1977, the train switched to the B network . The BSA31 device from TeKaDe was used for this. The area code for outside calls to the train was now: 575XX.

Payphones replaced the BSA31 . In 1980, two prototypes were installed on the Gutenberg and Senator IC trains that ran between Hamburg and Munich. In 1981 and 1982 150 payphones were installed in all IC trains. The device MüFu265 from Siemens, a special design of the Interset 200, was used .

The switch to payphones also resulted in the service of the writing section ending. The actual use of the offer to have texts written was not very high. The work of the train secretaries as intermediaries for telephone calls predominated and was now superfluous. With the 1982 summer timetable , the typing service was discontinued on May 22, 1982.

C network

With the introduction of the new lines , the use of the B2 network previously used in IC / EC trains was not possible due to many tunnels and cuts. The tunnel radio system 91 was developed for this purpose and tested at Orxhausen ( high-speed line Hanover – Würzburg ).

From June 2, 1991, around 400 telephones for the C network were put into operation in the new ICE trains of the first series , and a further 600 identical devices were installed in IC and IR trains by 1996.

The technology was based on the standard OF7 car phone from Bosch under the name Ökart-Zug . The device worked with a voltage of 110 V direct current . Further equipment features were:

All of this was summarized on a plate for the mobile transfer device (MUELE) and was located below the telephone in a lockable cabinet.

Either a personal TeleKarte including PIN or a normal telephone card was required for the customer in order to be able to use the device. This could also be bought directly from the train attendant . Calls cost 2.63 DM per minute or part thereof. The fees were stored in the device on a RAM disk with 1 megabyte (MB), were transported to Hamburg and could only be evaluated there.

The train could now also be called from outside: The dial-in was: 0161 / 3625XXX, whereby the train number no longer represented the last digits of the telephone numbers, but a list of corresponding numbers had to be used. The incoming call was then stored on an answering machine , which the train crew listened to. This then notified the passenger over the public address system that a call had been received for him or her.

The C network was shut down by Deutsche Telekom on December 30, 2000 - a development that Deutsche Bahn missed, which meant that the trains no longer had mobile communications for a while.

D network

From the spring of 2000, the trains received devices that worked with the D1 network and thus for the first time digitally. Calls now cost around 1.50 DM / minute and were billed to the second. A phone card was also required. This technology was followed by the proliferation of cell phones and the introduction of on -board amplifiers . The built-in card phones in the trains were then shut down and expanded.

literature

Web links

Remarks

  1. ↑ Public card phone, Zug.
  2. ↑ "Rail: C-network telephones in ICE and EC / IC switched off - The train telephones in all 370 ICE and IC / EC trains of the railway have been switched off for a week and will remain so for some time." The previous train telephones were working in Telekom's C network. However, this mobile network went out of service at the turn of the year 2000/2001. However, the railway did not manage to set up a replacement system in time. "The negotiations with the telephone network operators have dragged on for so long," said Bahn spokeswoman Kornelia Kneissl [...] (report on Chip online from January 8, 2001 - quoted from: Hessberger).

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Information largely based on Hessberger and the sources shown and cited there.
  2. ↑ § 13 Royal Bavarian State Railways (Ed.): Service instructions for the implementation of special trains of the highest and highest gentlemen. (Special service instruction = SdzDA). Valid from April 1, 1907 . Munich 1907.
  3. ^ NN: telephone traffic .
  4. ^ NN: telephone traffic .
  5. ^ NN: telephone traffic .
  6. ^ NN: telephone traffic .
  7. ^ NN: telephone traffic .
  8. ^ Deutsche Bundesbahn: Kursbuch . Complete edition. Summer 1974, p. 11, no.12.
  9. ↑ Annual review 1991 of the Deutsche Bundesbahn . In: Die Bundesbahn , vol. 68, issue 1, January 1992, ISSN  0007-5876 , p. 53.
  10. ^ Popper, p. 877.
  11. ^ Popper, p. 879.
  12. ↑ Popper, p. 881.