Quick Quiz: What is this?

Open it, and allow us to see what's inside.

An ancient transformer from the EARLY days lol? I actually have no clue.

Just a guess: Railroad express messenger box?

lantern case?

Safe from a baggage car? 

Looks like a case for a Survey Transit.

I would say something having to do with signal equipment.  Possibly a case to carry a replacement searchlight signal mechanism out into the field for insertion in the signal housing?

All cabooses had a dispatchers phone along with a set of long poles  with wires that could be hooked up to the telegraph lines. The time card would show you what wires to hook up to.     Is this a phone case?( although  it looks a little big.)

Perhaps a case for transporting a "flux capacitor"    

Gregg posted:

Is this a phone case?( although  it looks a little big.)

I think we have a winner here!

     I picked this up at a telephone show in Lancaster, PA this past weekend. It is of Rock Island origin. It is local-battery talking. Hence the size, as it originally would have housed three #6 dry cells.

     Interestingly, it has no form of signaling (ie. a magneto crank and ringer). But since this would be attached to a line that would be routed to a loudspeaker, and since, being portable, it wouldn't be a phone that would be called, I assume that whoever designed it (It appears to have been built in-house by the Rock Island) left them off as unnecessary.

     As far as a date goes, the "Bulldog" style transmitter dates it to no earlier than the 1930's.

 I've copied a few train orders over this type of phone out on the road on works trains. Although each siding had a similar  dispatchers phone at each end of the siding this thing could be hooked  anywhere you could reach the wires  and it would give direct contact to the train dispatcher,  You could  listen in  the dispatcher giving orders to different train order stations . section  crew line ups etc.  Yep the dispatcher couldn't ring you up.  

We still used them in the late 60s on work trains .