Radio Station In A Train Station

This is the only instance of a radio station I have ever found in a train station. It would be cooler if they had occupied the space together but no such luck. Electrified rail lines emit substantial RF interference making the co-habitation unlikely if not unnatural. More here.

This building operated as the Blairstown, NJ train station until 1970.  After a long struggle by Nick DeRienzo, a new station 106.3 signed on in Blairstown in 1973 with an Oldies format using the call letters WFMV-FM. It stood for Warren FM Voice.  The train station housed the radio studios from then until the early 1990s. When the  North Jersey Rail Commuter Association was promoting the restoration of service to the Lackawanna Cut-Off in the late 1980s they did so on-air at WFMV because of their unusual studio. More here.

It was owned by the Warren Broadcasting Corporation.  WFMV was sold to Clearview Broadcasting in 1981. By 1984 though WFMV evolved into more of a Hot Adult Contemporary format. In the summer of 1988 due to environmental issues and the drought the station was forced to leave the air from 10:00 AM to 6:00 PM daily for several summer months. In 1991 it became WHCY. In March 1996 the station was sold to Nassau Broadcasting. It was sometimes between 1991 and 1996 that the station left their home beside the railroad tracks. More here.

Nassau turned around and sold the station in a set of trades and LMAs to Clear Channel in deals to Clear Channel in late 2001. By 2008 the station was airing a fully automated AC playlist with no local programming.

The Electromotograph

 One of the earliest references to trains and  radio transmission I can find comes from the labs of Thomas Edison. In the mid-1880s, he patented an induction powered system on December 29, 1891. He called the receiving machine an "electromotograph" and the technique "grasshopper telegraphy." Rather than rehashing the patent, I'll just quote it.

"A cylinder of chalk, moistened with solution of caustic soda, is mounted so as to be rotated by a handle. A diaphragm has an arm connected to its center. This arm is pressed against the surface of the cylinder by a spring. When the cylinder is rotated, a constant tension is exerted on the diaphragm. If a current is passed through the junction of arm and cylinder the electrolytic action alters the friction so as to change the stress upon the diaphragm. If the current producing this effect is of the type produced by the human voice through a microphone the successive variations in strain upon the diaphragm will cause it to emit articulate sounds."

Edison had already sold his telephone patent to the Bell company, who also had bought several other phone related patents. So Edison needed to effectively reinvent the entire telephone. This sort of instance happened a lot in his career, today it's called NIH. Edison restarted with a good carbon-pencil transmitter invented by Frederic Gower.Then he began working on the new receiver. he filed for a patent in 1886 and it was granted in 1891. You can read it here. More on the electromotograph here.

Different systems used electrostatic and electromagnetic induction.  Let's define those quickly to save you from looking those up.  Nobody does that anyway.

• Electrostatic induction:  The redistribution of electrical charge in an object, caused by the influence of nearby charges. This is the principle under which the Van de Graaff generator functions.

• Electromagnetic induction:  The production of an electric current across a conductor moving through a magnetic field. This effect governs the function of a solenoid among other things.

Here's where we get to radio.  Edison's system used electromagnetic induction which gave it some unusual features. It allowed telegraphic signals to jump the short distance between a running train and telegraph wires running parallel to the tracks. You still see old wires like these running along old lines today. During the Great Blizzard of 1888, this system was used to send and receive wireless messages from trains buried in snowdrifts, perhaps the first successful use of wireless telegraphy to send distress calls.

Beyond that kind of emergency use, it had very little commercial appeal. Edison sold the system to Marconi in 1903. It was never used again to my knowledge.

First Broadcast from a Train (Part 2)

Back in 2009 I posted a claim that the first broadcast from a moving train was staged in 1932. That post is here. A commenter rightly pointed out that trains did have wireless communication for decades before that. So allow me to walk back my post, and explain why I went with the 1932 date. Factually speaking, the Lackawanna Limited train tests of 1913 and 1914 were transmitted from a moving train. So I'll concede that point. Certainly any radio man with the right gear could have listened in.  But I'll split hairs on one point: This was not a broadcast per se, there was no program of entertainment; these were all intended to be person-to-person transmissions.

The Lackawanna Limited train left New York City on November 21st, 1913. It was the first train in the world equipped with wireless telegraph. Tests were conducted that day and on several later occasions, probably at 1600 meters. On the same Lackawanna train on May 1st, 1914, similar tests were conducted by De Forest radio telephone.

On April 5th, Lackawanna conducted its a public radio phone test on a train called the Cornell Special, that ran between Ithaca, NY and New York, NY. It departed at 12:35 PM and arrived in NYC at 7:10 PM. What was public" about this test was that they had installed speakers in the buffet car, so that passengers could listen to concerts broadcast by the various radio transmitting stations. It was an unheard of luxury at the time. They also had a small transmitting set on board for the purpose of testing the transmission of messages to and from the moving train to amateur radio stations along the route. I'll quote at length from Railway Signaling And Communications, of April 1922:

"The set used was operated by two young radio experts, David W. Richardson of Princeton University, and G. Donald Murray, both of whom were in charge of radio station 3DH of Princeton University. The Lackawanna installed wireless telegraph service at Hoboken, N. J., Scranton, PA, and Binghamton, NY, during the fall and winter of 1913. The installations consisted of standard Marconi apparatus. Five kw. was used at Hoboken and 2 kw. at Scranton and Binghamton, using multiple plate quenched gap and the induced voltage was 20,000 at 500 cycles; wave length 1,600 meters. No difficulty was experienced in maintaining continuous communication and a large amount of traffic was handled. Early in 1914 telegraph sets were installed on the Lackawanna Limited. Motor generators were especially built by the Crocker Wheeler Company, to operate on the 30-volt car lighting service."

The antennae were removed at the beginning of WWI, though it was later re-installed. Wireless radio signaling quickly became indispensable there and everywhere.