Quote:
Originally Posted by Hermitcrab
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Phoneday was 16 April 1995, and I always thought all local codes were discontinued by then. However, if it was 23 June then that was only a couple of months later, do you know which exchanges were the last ones to lose their local codes?
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The last three with local codes were in the SC003 charge group to the south of Lanark which was on level 93 from Lanark with the STD code 0864 X.
Crawford on the A74, Crawford John to the north west and Elvanfoot to the south.
They were all dialling 9 to reach Lanark until 23rd June.
At 10am two were changed over -
Elvanfoot (0864 5) a UAX13R in the
middle of nowhere on the A702 road to Dumfries from Elvanfoot. It had just over 50 lines on it having been converted from a UAX12 with the coming of STD.
The other was a UAX13 at
Crawford John (0864 4) with just over 50 lines.
Then at just before 10.30am the 'ceremony' of what BT thought was the 'last public electro-mechanical exchange' in the UK network took place at
Crawford on a now bypassed section of the old A74 to the north of Crawford. There a BT engineer by the name of Bob Hope (not the one you're thinking of ;-) ) cut the cables on the MDF Of the 600 line SAX then two children from the local primary school pulled the wedges out to bring the new exchange into service. All thee exchanges became 6 digit numbers in the 0864 LNS and dialled the STD code to reach Lanark. This took place in front of the twenty or so of us squashed into the tiny building - Directors of BT, GPT(who had provided the new exchange and the Press & TV. BT had hoped for 'national' publicity being the end of an £11 billion project. Sadly never made it as John Major resigned as Chairman of the Tory party and there wasn't time for BT's bit. Luckily I captured the entire ceremony from before 10am until after the Crawford change-over on video. Plus it wasn't the ' last public electro-mechanical exchange' - that was almost a month later! But that's another story.