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Norman Reser works in the telegraph office at the mock Temple train depot within the Railroad and Heritage Museum, demonstrates the role of Morse code in telegraphry. Rebekah Workman / Telegram
Floyd Bumpus sits in the telegraph booth at the railroad museum. Rebekah Workman / Telegram

To the untrained ear, it’s gibberish or white noise. The quick-to-come dashes and dots sound like never-ending bullet shots or beeps - depending on the volume and type of key used.

But to 90-year-old Norman Reser and 79-year-old Floyd Bumpus, the shots and beeps make perfect sense.

“I don’t hear dots and dashes, I hear words,” Reser said. “When I speak, you don’t hear ‘t, h and e.’ You just hear ‘the.’ It’s the same for me.”

The two gentlemen work the telegraph booth at Temple’s Railroad and Heritage Museum. Telegraphy is a method of communication that predates the telephone; it uses Morse code. For more than 100 years since the Civil War, trains talked to each other with telegraphs.

“If you have one train coming from one direction and another train coming from the opposite direction on the same track, and if you don’t have a way to talk, well then you have a problem,” Reser said. “Morse code was how the depots would communicate arrivals and departures.”

In the late 1800s and early 1900s, the same railroad telegraph line went from Galveston to Fort Worth.

“There were other depots between those two cities, and all the depots had telegraph offices,” Reser said, explaining how telegraph lines worked. “A message that Galveston sent to Fort Worth was heard in all the depots between them.”

Confusing? Not for those who know the code.

“Think of a crowded restaurant,” Reser said. “You’re talking with the people at your table. You can hear that the others in the restaurant are talking. You recognize it as language but don’t hear every word they’re saying. It’s the same in code. You don’t pay attention until someone says your name.”

In the case of Morse code, it was a call name or ID number.

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