There were a lot of held orders, not only for subsriber lines but for interoffice trunks between offices in the exchange area but for toll trunks. I remeber when I was in the Austin division office of SWBell in the mid-1950s there were discussions about held upgrade orders for customers in Waco, presumably party-line customers who wanted a higher grade of service, dating back to 1934 (the Great Depression intervened and then Worl War II). snother discussion was about an oil company in Beaumont that wanted an FX to Houston. There were 20 toll trunks between Houston and Beaumont, no relief in sight, and completing the FX order would mean turning down 1 of the 20 trunks to provide the FX. (Trunks were expensive then, much different than today.) Company headquarters in Stl. Louis couln't (or wouldn't) believe the forecast for much of Texas, leading to such things as when the initial dial office was built in Odessa, before it was cut over to service the wall of the building had been knocked out to provide for the first addition to the office, which required an addition to the building. Wes Leatherock snipped-for-privacy@aol.com snipped-for-privacy@yahoo.com