Re: Brother Cole? Brother Trump?

What that is is an Automatic Electric "local battery" ("local battery means that the "talk" circuit voltage was supplied by drycells in a battery box mounted near the phone and did not come from a distant Central Office) magneto telephone, and a fairly
modern one at that.....Circa 1950 or so.

Telephones like this were common on magneto lines during the last years such existed, and generally compatible with the familiar wood box phones having separate transmitters and receivers usually associated with rural telephone systems.

Magneto ringing was not generally used on RR message or DS phones, although local battery phones were. RR phones generally had a "push-to-talk" switch in the handsets unlike regular telephones of this class which were used to keep the transmitters quiet on the DS or message line from noisy locations along trackside, except when the user was actually talking.

The D&RGW made extensive use of local battery handset phones in wayside booths mostly as replacements for the older wood box types as the older types were often stolen by miscreants.