The National Watch and Clock Museum
  Depot Agent's Office
"Running the Trains"

America Connected 

In 1830, only 23 miles of railroad track existed the entire United States; 50 years later there were over 100,000. The middle of the 19th century saw the first efforts to transform what was a jumble of local railroads into a true national transportation system. This entailed a standardization of equipment, train signals, ticket procedures and baggage handling, as well as the coordination of train schedules. This last matter was complicated by the fact that there was no such thing as standard time.

Up until 1883, the majority of Americans obeyed apparent solar time, or time told by the sun. Even though many people owned some type of mechanical timekeeper 9which kept mean time), these clocks and watches were set by a sundial or the position of the sun itself (the best reference point being 'high noon', when the sun reached its highest point in the sky). You may remember from the longitude story that there is a relationship between solar time and location: the earth rotates and the sun seems to travel westward across the continents, high noon travels with it. This means that cities only a few miles apart have different high noons, and, hence, different local times. this made things complicated for both those that ran and used the railroads. Could a passenger arriving in Pittsburgh at 4:00 p.m. New York time catch a connecting train leaving Pittsburgh at 4"00 p.m. Pittsburgh time? the confusion only increased as rail lines were extended into the west, covering a greater span of longitude.

Many scientists, professionals, and officials felt that local time was an antiquated notion which may have been adequate when communities were fairly isolated, but was impractical in a society increasingly linked by telegraph and railroad. Standard time, they argued, was essential for technical and commercial progress. Although standard time seems perfectly logical now, it was a contentious issue at the time, meeting with opposition from many people who felt that local time, or time told by the sun, was nature's time or God's time, and should not be overturned by anyone, especially the railroads. 

America Synchronized 

In the interests of efficiency and safety most railroads maintained a single time across their entire line (usually that of the biggest city they served). In the middle of the 19th century, a busy railroad station would likely have had several clocks, each indicating the time used by a particular line.

In the 1850s, a number of railroads began subscribing to the time services offered by American observatories, paying to have accurate astronomical time signals telegraphed to each station along their individual lines. Because of services like this, a haphazard but practical system of regional standard times had evolved by the mid 1870s. thanks to consolidation and cooperation between railroads, by 1880 the traveling public only had to puzzle through through 53 distinct railroad times (down from over 80 in 1870).

Between 1872 and 1882, scientific and professional societies devoted a great deal of thought to the issue of standard time. they generally rejected the idea of a uniform public time for the entire country, advocating a time zone system that would be more in keeping with solar time. 

Several plans were advanced, and while most of them agreed on four zone boundaries and zone standards (i.e. whether to base the zones on Greenwich meridians or meridians  of major American cities).

Ultimately, it was not a scientific organization or a legislative body but a group of railroad superintendents that instituted standard time. In October 1883, the General Time Convention approved a plan establishing five North American time zones (four in the US and a fifth covering easternmost provinces of Canada) based on the Greenwich meridians. A month later, on November 18, the "day of two noons", Standard Railroad Time was put into effect. While the switch to standard time itself only amounted to a small adjustment of clocks and watches (usually less than half an hour forward or back), it represented a big conceptual change. While many communities accepted and even embraced the change as a sign and condition of progress, others thought it unnatural and refused to use it. However, it did slowly gain acceptance, and by the time standard time became law in 1918, most communities had already adopted it.