Railway time
The key goals behind introducing railway time were to overcome the confusion caused by having non-uniform local times in each town and station stop along the expanding railway network[1] and to reduce the incidence of accidents and near misses, which were becoming more frequent as the number of train journeys increased.
The railway companies sometimes faced concerted resistance from local people who refused to adjust their public clocks to bring them into line with London Time.
[4] Some contemporary commentators referred to the influence of railway time on encouraging greater precision in daily tasks and the demand for punctuality.
It was replaced by local mean time, which eliminated the variation due to seasonal differences and anomalies.
Almanacs containing tables were published and instructions attached to sundials to enable the differences between local times to be computed.
[7] Before the arrival of the railways, journeys between the larger cities and towns could take many hours or days, and these differences could be dealt with by adjusting the hands of a watch periodically en route.
The electric telegraph, which had been developed in the early part of the 19th century, was refined by William Fothergill Cooke and Charles Wheatstone and was installed on a short section of the Great Western Railway in 1839.
By 1852 a telegraph link had been constructed between a new electro-magnetic clock at Greenwich and initially Lewisham, and shortly after this London Bridge stations.
[5] On the other hand, not all railway companies convinced the local dignitaries to bring their clocks on public buildings in line without stern resistance.
[15] As late as the 1950s, the Western Region of British Railways had an elaborate telephone ritual at 11:00 am for all signal boxes to synchronise their clocks with that at Paddington Station.
[16] One of the first reported incidents which brought about a change in how time was organised on railways in the United States occurred in New England in August 1853, the Valley Falls train collision.
Two trains heading towards each other on the same track collided as the conductors had different times set on their watches, resulting in the death of 14 passengers.
In doing so they would pre-empt the imposition of more costly and cumbersome arrangements by different state legislators and the naval authorities, both of whom favoured retention of local times.
For example, in Indianapolis the report in the daily Sentinel for 17 November 1883 protested that people would have to "eat sleep work ... and marry by railroad time".
It also required clocks inside railway stations and train schedules to be set five minutes late to allow travelers to arrive late without missing their trains, even while clocks on the external walls of railway stations displayed Paris Mean Time.
However, it was not until 1 April 1893 that a law was established by the German Empire "concerning the introduction of uniform time reckoning" by which all railways would operate and also all aspects of social, industrial and civil activity would henceforth be strictly regulated.
[24] Italy was newly unified as a country when on 12 December 1866 at the start of the winter season the railway timetables centred on Turin, Verona, Florence, Rome, Naples and Palermo were synchronised on the time in Rome, which although it would remain notionally at least under French military control until 1870, was seen as the heart of the nation.
This persisted until 1940, when the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands required a shift to German time, which has continued to be the standard.
[29] The Indian railway companies had to contend with different local times as the rapidly expanding routes extended out from Mumbai (formerly Bombay), Kolkata (formerly Calcutta), Lahore and Chennai (formerly Madras).
