I tried it a few more times and at one point even came up with a
> 1960's style ring tone with no answer. Is it possible the old gear is
> still in the little brick telco building by Rockland Lake and taking > overload calls ?
> 845-268-xxxx.
Rather unlikely. The switch is a nice modern DMS-100 with vastly more capacity than whatever electromechanical thing it replaced. I can think of a variety of possible explanations, none terribly plausible.
I do know that when you get a busy signal, as often as not the signal you hear is generated by the switch at your end and the circuit is dropped as soon as the remote switch can tell your switch to give you a busy. (This is why calls to Europe produce US busy signals rather than the local European busy signal.) They don't do that for ring, but of course the ring tone is all digital, so who knows what sort of recording some wag might have installed.
R's,
John