Nearly Every UK Village Has One Of These

Nearly Every UK Village Has One Of These - Telephone Tuesdays

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Күн бұрын

Пікірлер: 55

@mfx1 3 ай бұрын

I used to track down radio and TV interference and once had pretty much a whole village complaining, we tracked it to the local exchange similar to this but when we got access the interference disappeared making it hard to find the source until we realised that the exchange was heated with thermostat control (basically a frost stat) but when the lights were switched on it assumed engineers must be there so turned the heating on full bypassing the thermostat and it was the arcing thermostat causing the interference made worse by the phone lines acting as antennas.

@kaitlyn__L 3 ай бұрын

oof, arc noise is NASTY

@AndrewAHayes 3 ай бұрын

My friend lives in a converted old telephone exchange, back in the mid 2000's he called his net provider as his broadband speed was nowhere near what he was paying for, they gave him the old chestnut that it depended on how far he was away from the exchange, my friend reminded the guy on the phone that he had asked him to confirm his address before speaking to him, his address is The Old Exchange, he told them that the new one was right across the road and he couldn't be any nearer to it, they agreed to look into it and after the engineer had done his thing his connection was as fast as the contract he was paying for. It makes you wonder how many people were fobbed off with that old chestnut when there was in fact a fault.

@fatmark1971 3 ай бұрын

Thanks for keeping up with this segment Mitch & Sam. Its a look at all the questions I had in my childhood, but had no one to ask. When BT changed over, they moved the whole of my local exchange into the old broom cupboard!!! Cheers Mark

@jacketrussell 3 ай бұрын

That takes me back. I was a GPO Telecomms apprentice in 1971. Used to visit UAXs all the time.

@SomeoneBloodyRandom 3 ай бұрын

I love how a single line drop is coming from the pole to the building.

@Tomsonic41 3 ай бұрын

Until the early 2000s, there was one of these buildings near Normanton station in Yorkshire. I used to go past it regularly on the train from Leeds to Sheffield. It was all derelict and overgrown, but you could still see remnants of the old insulators where it would have connected to the telephone poles!

@wickedcurve1975 3 ай бұрын

Horray! These videos rock! Thank you for your work! Have a fun week!

@Fewkulele 3 ай бұрын

I love that a channel I followed because of midi controlled flamethrowers is teaching me about telecoms infrastructure

@BTTT-c9q 3 ай бұрын

Brilliant, thank you I liked the comparison. A lot of BT use the exchanges now to store equipment, park vans and larger ones just have managers offices and storage of equipment. Brill! So great to see, that is a tiny exchange, some really small hut like buildings are repeater stations too

@ianhighley-zo3es 3 ай бұрын

Thanks for your book recommendation “Please Wipe Your Boots” in the last video, it was a great read, really enjoyed it.

@popeter 3 ай бұрын

the one i grew up near was 4x the size of this one despite being a tiny village, considering it had a kitchenette vissable feel like it was built during manual switchboard days

@richardbrobeck2384 3 ай бұрын

Here in america you can also find old builds like this that were used for exchanges too.

@darrenj912 3 ай бұрын

Worked in dozens of those all over the country as a dismantling engineer, removing all the old analogue equipment for recycling for B.T.

@jamesdecross1035 3 ай бұрын

We lost a small telephone exchange in Norwich, not long ago. They keep moving! Completely demolished before the industrial archaeology was recorded. Great shame. Fascinating machines.

@richardneale246 3 ай бұрын

I worked for BT in Norwich. The exchange "Norwich D" in Westwick Street has been demolished. It was the old telex and TV link exchange.

@Colin_Ames 3 ай бұрын

Great video, as always, and I actually managed to watch it on a Tuesday!

@EDDIE.EDDISON 3 ай бұрын

I grew up in rural Victoria Aust. In a little shire, at the end of my looong road at the highway sits a little white building at my old bus stop… i used to hear the Uax’s chattering away in the cold foggy mornings before school 👍 memberberries!

@kay_glo 3 ай бұрын

This is a great video!

@richardneale246 3 ай бұрын

I've worked in many of these over the years whilst working for BT. Love the dropwire attached to the exchange !!! Some of these buildings were also Repeater Stations.

@ncot_tech 3 ай бұрын

I saw that too... why's the exchange got a phone line connected to it? Is it now decommissioned and some random storage building now, and they just gave it a phone? I'm guessing the green box contains a modern equivalent of what the building used to be.

@richardneale246 3 ай бұрын

@@ncot_tech Surprised the BT logo was still on the building, but couldn't see the usual BT private property sign. I would guess it's in private ownership. When I worked for BT they were talking of putting some of the smaller exhanges into the green cabinets and also combining exchanges, part of the 21st Century Fibre network which would see quite a reduction in the need for exchanges.

@mpellatt 3 ай бұрын

@@richardneale246ah yes, 21CN, overtaken by the tech before it was much more than half implemented. At last that fate didn't (quite) befall System X. Now, don't get me started on the insanity of even thinking about G.Fast, let alone rolling it out.... Although once you find out how many final loops are DIG (Direct In Ground) I can see the appeal to the beam counters. 4:30

@sivoltage 3 ай бұрын

would love to see inside. Also would be great to see more out in the field stuff.

@DISCOTECHS 3 ай бұрын

The building you visited started off life as a small UAX 13 with 200 extension only with 4 racks plus The C rack and a couple of B racks. At the time, local to local calls were free of charge to subscribers in the village. That building has been extended to accommodate some more racks. You will see this if you look closely at the roof.And the age of the bricks along the wall. The B racks would have been dismantled and new junctions put in. The racks for outgoing and incoming junctions, would then have been upgraded. They introduced charging for locals at that time, so Local Call Timers relay sets would have been added. There is a video on KZbin of what that building would have looked like inside.😮

@Alan_UK 3 ай бұрын

In 1978 I went to live in Vernham Dean in north west Hampshire where the exchange was (and still is) a wooden hut with corrugated roof - probably a bit damp! Then we had a 3 digit number and a local exchange code that was for another village with much smaller population*. We had to dial a prefix for Andover, the nearest town. Exchange is behind the school. [*in 70s the County Council earmarked the quiet village of about 30 houses as an expansion village and circa 100 new houses were built].

@trident989 13 күн бұрын

brings back memories, I grew up in what was then a village and walked past a mysterious building to school from the mid 70's to mid 80's, quite often hearing the sounds we've become used to on Telephone Tuesdays. All the subscribers only had 4 digit numbers and we even shared a party line with the house behind us for several years. The village grew and then became part of the city exchange adding a preceding 23 to our old number

@Alan_UK 12 күн бұрын

@@trident989 Our number was 609 I recall and the exchange was called Linkenholt. In c1979 our 1st child started at then school. I think the previous head mistress of many years, maybe decades, had just retired and Mr Torrington came in. School moved from Victorian look and feel to something more modern though it needed another change of headteacher to get propelled into the 20C. Villages can be sleepy places!

@gcewing 2 ай бұрын

It's probably empty now except for a tiny box of electronics in the corner doing what all that switching gear used to do.

@gordonwill6885 3 ай бұрын

Haha, been in many of these in rural Angus, my uncle was a GPO engineer, there was one I remember being tiny and hidden behind a small forest in the middle of nowhere..

@loopinnerthe 3 ай бұрын

Mitch on location.I so wish we could have peeped in the window. I hope whoever owns that building watches this and takes pity on all of us desperate souls and gives us a tour inside. Thank you for The totally topical Telephone Tuesdays Time

@kaitlyn__L 3 ай бұрын

This brought back a vague memory. My village before I moved to Glasgow had two of these, one large and one small. I think the small one must've been added-in when some new-build houses were added. It was at the end of the street and hidden behind a wall in the same style as the development, rather than a wire fence like the larger one. They had BT signage but also high voltage warnings. The larger one buzzed like a substation and also had an SSE sign, not sure if they co-located utilities, but the small one was silent. Perhaps the signs were merely to discourage trespass (didn't stop the village kids!), so maybe the larger one was only a substation and the small one handled all of our phones. The small one was definitely newer, so if that's the case perhaps they moved the telecoms equipment out of the bigger one at that time.

@berndeckenfels 3 ай бұрын

That outgrown had a Colin Furze style to it

@guysmiley7289 3 ай бұрын

We have those in small American towns too.

@isaacplaysbass8568 3 ай бұрын

So cool.

@DDock3287 3 ай бұрын

Could very well be the depot for DSL equipment and newer pots equipment.

@seamusellis1450 3 ай бұрын

The one at Camber is now a launderette..

@christianherald 3 ай бұрын

lots of cool stuff in there, but the best stuff in there is you!

@traumgeist 3 ай бұрын

I left that light on. That’s my bedroom in there.

@TokkanFX 3 ай бұрын

But oddly @3:10 in the video you can see what looks to be a telephone line comming in?

@THISMUSEUMISNOTOBSOLETE 3 ай бұрын

🤔

@ACYONE98 3 ай бұрын

I'm impressed with the quality of the building : tiles, bricks, windows... Did people work in these on a regular basis ? I expected a concrete block with a metal door, like you would see on electrical substations

@gcewing 2 ай бұрын

The gear is a bit more delicate than electrical substation equipment, I imagine they'd want to keep the weather out fairly well.