Our outdoor layout is far from the house and garage. And it always seemed the phone would ring when we were out at the layout. Many times these were important client calls.
Cell phones don’t work out where we are. No nearby tower, and the mountains really mess with signals.
So I thought about installing an outdoor phone at the layout so if I was ever out playing with trains and a call came in I would be able to get it. Kind of like an old railroad call box.
I looked online for outdoor phones and couldn’t find much that was fairly affordable or included a ringer.
Then I found an old Western Electric outdoor phone on eBay that also had a ringer. It didn’t work when I got it…Well at least the first time I tried it. But some minor wire work on the inside and I got it to work. The hardest part was figuring out how to wire it to our existing landline wiring (2 line system). The standard red and green for one line was easy, but the black wire also had to tie into the red to get the ringer to work. The yellow wire was used as the ground.
OK maybe the hardest part was digging and burying the 200 + feet of phone cable. I think I now know why these are called the rocky mountains. So many rocks I had to dig through.
But I really like the feeling of accomplishing something like this. And it is fun calling out on a rotary phone. I kind of remember rotary phones when I was really young, but it’s been a long time.
Here it is. It is mounted to a piece of cedar (treated with Jasco Termin-8 black) which is mounted to a tree. Ponderosa pines make great mounting posts.
