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Railroads and Time
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With the completion of the transcontinental railway, marking and maintaining precision time became more important than ever before. Prior to standard railway time, each city and town had its own time, often connected to "sun time" which was based on the sun's movement across the sky. As railroads crossed various local standard times, scheduling became increasingly complicated. Timetables and timekeepers, therefore, were an essential part of railroad operations.
Up until the National Railway Time Convention |
adopted a National Time Standard in 1883, each railroad company maintained its own standard time with little coordination with other companies. In the late 1870's the Union Pacific operated it's trains across six different time standards.
The National Time Standard was based on a national time hour set by zones separated by the 75th, 90th, 105th, and 120th meridians west of the Greenwich, England prime. This standard, still in use today, was legalized by Congress in 1918. |
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