preAMPS mobile phones, was 1947 Train Phone service Cleverness: some

I used MTS a little bit. Our family vacations every summer on an island off the coast of New Hampshire, and for many years the only phone was an MTS car phone mounted in an old phone booth in the hotel lobby.

The phone was an IMTS phone with a dial, but the service we had was completely manual. To call the island, you'd dial O, then ask the operator for the Dover NH mobile operator, then ask that operator for JS8-3445.

For outbound calls, you (or more likely one of the island employees so they could log the call and put it on your bill) would pick up the phone, wait for the operator to answer, and then give the call details. It could be a long wait if other MTS users were on the phone since there were a small set of channels, shared among all the users of that system. The handset was push to talk, although since the system was full duplex a lot of people just kept the button pushed despite instructions to the contrary. When the call was done, you said "JS8-3445, clear" to tell the operator you were done.

It was quite expensive, something like three bucks plus the normal toll charges. About ten years ago they replaced it with a two line Motorola point to point phone extender with the other end in the steeple of a church on the mainland (it's a church camp), so the island now just has two POTS numbers. Although the island is six miles off shore, cell phones work fine, so we don't use the shared phone much any more.

It is my strong recollection that bag and brick phones were available about the same time car phones were. I do know that the AMPS phone I had in my car also came in a bag phone version, which was nice when some kid with an odd sense of humor stole the handset and the cheapest way to replace it was to buy the bag version on ebay, use the handset, and throw away the bag.

R's, John