The first popular railway timetable combining several lines appeared in 1839, but carried an inbuilt flaw: clocks throughout Great Britain were not synchronised. Before the railway network few saw the need. If the clocks in Oxford ran 5 minutes and 2 seconds behind London time, or those in Bristol 10 minutes behind, and those in Exeter 14 minutes behind (this was indeed the case with all three westward cities in the 1830s, each enjoying a later sunrise and sunset than London) it was simply a matter of adjusting your timepiece when you arrived.7 The clock at the town hall or main church tended to be the master timekeeper for the local community, the time still set according to the midday sun; a relatively static populace cared little for the time elsewhere in the country so long as their own local timepieces ran at the same time. If road or waterway journeys were undertaken, the time differences would either be adjusted en route (some coaching companies provided adjustment lists), or be judged to be commensurate with the unreliability of a traveller’s pocket watch or carriage clock. But with railways, a new time consciousness affected all who travelled: the concept of ‘punctuality’ was born anew.
Passengers who prided themselves on the accuracy of their watches (and as the century went on, there were many more of these) were joined by an entirely new watch-owning class – railwaymen. Neither would be satisfied with what they saw as unnecessary wrinkles in precision. If railway station clocks were left unsynchronised, composite and comparable timetables between destination and arrival points would not only cause confusion and frustration, but would be increasingly impossible and dangerous to maintain. As railways filled the countryside, a driver’s watch at variance with another’s would almost certainly end in collision. And then, a year later, a solution was found, at least in Britain. For the first time, timekeeping achieved nationwide standardisation: the railways began to imprint their own clock upon the world.
In November 1840 the Great Western Railway was the first to adopt the idea that time along its route should be the same no matter where a passenger alighted or departed. This task was made possible with the advent of the electric telegraph the year before, with time signals from Greenwich being sent directly along trackside wires. ‘Railway time’ thus aligned itself with ‘London time’, and by 1847 it was running on the North Western Railway (where its greatest champion was Henry Booth), the London and South Western, the Lancaster and Carlisle, South Eastern, Caledonian, the Midland and the East Lancashire lines.
There were other maverick champions too. In 1842, Abraham Follett Osler, a glassmaker and meteorologist from Birmingham, believed so strongly in the establishment of standardised time beyond the railways that he took matters into his own hands. Having raised funds for the erection of a new clock outside the Birmingham Philosophical Institution, he proceeded one evening to change its time from local to London time (moving it forward 7 minutes and 15 seconds). People noticed, but they also admired the clock’s accuracy; within the course of a year, local churches and shopkeepers changed their time to match it.
By mid-century, about 90 per cent of Britain’s railways were running on London time, although the regulation met a little local opposition. Many city officials objected to any interference from London, and showed their disapproval by maintaining clocks with two minute hands – the later one usually denoting their local, older time. In an article titled ‘Railway-time Aggression’, a correspondent in Chambers’ Edinburgh Journal in 1851 offered comical disgust: ‘Time, our best and dearest possession, is in danger. [Inhabitants were] now obliged, in many of our British towns and villages, to bend before the will of a vapour, and to hasten on his pace in obedience to the laws of a railway company! Was ever tyranny more monstrous or more unbearable than this?’ The writer backs his disdain with many examples, including a dinner party and a wedding both ruined as a result of time discrepancies, before rallying the readership:
Is it possible that this monster evil, with its insidious promises of good and its sure harvest of evil, will be tolerated by freeborn Englishmen? Surely not! Let us rather rally round Old Time with the determination to agitate, and, if needs be, to resist this arbitrary aggression. Let our rallying cry be ‘The Sun or the Railway!’ Englishmen! Beware of delay in opposing this dangerous innovation! No time is to be lost – ‘Awake, arise, or be forever fallen!’
Railway time could kill you just by being there. In 1868, one Dr Alfred Haviland, an epidemiologist and author of the guide Scarborough as a Health Resort, published Hurried To Death: or, A Few Words of Advice on the Danger of Hurry and Excitement Especially Addressed to Railway Passengers, in which, in fairly breathless prose, he warned of the risks of over-studying a train timetable and running to catch a departure, and being overly concerned with the era’s new schedules. His evidence, which managed to be both conclusive and dubious, centred on research suggesting that those who ventured regularly on the Brighton to London line aged faster than those who didn’t.
The new pressure of time was the cause of some amusement. In 1862, the Railway Traveller’s Handy Book, an indispensible guide to what to wear and how to comport oneself on the rails, and how to behave when going through a tunnel, contained a passage about the inexperienced traveller running to catch a train with time to spare:
About five minutes before a train starts, a bell is rung as a signal to passengers to prepare for starting. Persons unaccustomed to travel by railway connect the ringing of the bell with the instant departure of the train, and it is most amusing to watch the novices running helter-skelter along the platform, tumbling over everything and everybody in their eagerness to catch the train which they believe is about to go without them.
Those who travelled often, on the other hand, would use the bell as a signal to stand ‘by the carriage door coolly surveying the panic-stricken multitude’.8
The final unifying stroke came in 1880, with the passage in parliament of the Statutes (Definition of Time) Act. It was now a public order offence to knowingly display the wrong time on municipal buildings. But beyond Great Britain, time ran on different tracks. France, a nation that had embraced the railways later than many of its European neighbours, found a way to adapt its traditionally perverse attitude to time to its new transport. While most stations adopted Paris time for their schedules and external clocks, clocks within station buildings consistently and deliberately ran five minutes early to ease the pressure on passengers who might arrive late (this lasted from about 1840 to 1880; regular passengers, of course, grew wise to the ruse and adjusted their own scheduling accordingly, a nice display of laissez-faire).
In Germany the railways seemed to shrink time, as if a magical invention. When the theologian David Friedrich Strauss travelled from Heidelberg to Mannheim in the late 1840s he marvelled at a journey that took ‘half an hour instead of five hours’. In 1850 the Ludwigs railroad company shrunk time even more, advertising a trip from Nuremberg to Fürth, travelling ‘one and a half hours in ten minutes’. In his History of the Hour, the German theologian Gerhard Dohrn-van Rossum notices persistent contemporary references to the railways causing ‘the destruction of space and time’ and ‘the emancipation from nature’. As with Henry Booth in Liverpool, travellers cutting through mountains and spanning valleys estimated that the eradication of these obstacles practically doubled their lifespans. The imagination accelerated all possibilities.
The character of the nation, the volksgeist, determined that the trains not only consistently ran according to schedule but were shown to do so by station clocks synchronised from Berlin. But the acceptance of the transformation from ‘external’ local time to ‘internal’ railway time took more than fifty years. Germany was unified by railway time only in the 1890s, but it was political and military expediency, rather than a concern for the passenger, that forced the move. In 1891, Field Marshal Helmuth von Moltke, who had employed the railways effectively in his military campaigns in France, spoke in the Reichstag of the need for one clock throughout the country. The railways facilitated the greatest single improvemen
t the military had encountered in his lifetime – enabling him to amass 430,000 men in four weeks – but there was a problem to be overcome.
Gentlemen, in Germany we have five different time zones. In north Germany, including Saxony, we use Berlin time; in Bavaria, Munich time; in Würtemburg, Stuttgart time; in Baden, Karlsruhe time; and in the Rhenish Palatinate, Ludwigshafen time. All the inconveniences and disadvantages which we dread encountering on the French and Russian frontiers, we experience today in our own country. This is, I may say, a ruin which has been left standing, a relic of the time of German disruption – a ruin which, now that we have become an Empire, should be completely erased.’
And thus did Germany adopt the precision of Greenwich.9
But it was on the vast continent of North America that the issue of a standard time faced its greatest challenge. Even in the early 1870s, an American rail traveller would have to have faith indeed, for the station clocks offered 49 different times from east to west. It was noon in Chicago, but 12.31 in Pittsburgh. The issue assumed particular urgency after 1853, when irregular timekeeping caused several railway fatalities (it didn’t help that trains usually travelled in both directions on a single track).
A set of timekeeping instructions issued in August 1853 by W. Raymond Lee, the superintendent on the Boston and Providence Railroad, laid bare the complexities, and the propensity for human error. In part, it read like a Marx Brothers script: ‘Standard Time is two minutes later than Bond & Sons’ clock, No 17 Congress Street, Boston’ the first of these began. ‘The Ticket Clerk, Boston Station, and the Ticket Clerk, Providence Station, are charged with the duty of regulating Station Time. The former will daily compare it with Standard Time, and the latter will daily compare it with Conductor’s Time; and the agreement of any two Conductors upon a variation in Station Time shall justify him in changing it.’10
And so the call went out to an unlikely group of specialists. American astronomers had long argued that their observatory time was the most accurate available, and they were now required to set station clocks wherever possible (taking over from town clocks and jewellers’ windows as the custodians of reliability). Around 20 astronomical institutions administered time to the railways in the 1880s, with the US Naval Observatory taking the lead.
Apart from the astronomers, one figure stands out. A railway engineer named William F. Allen was permanent secretary of the General Time Convention, and had long seen the advantages of a universal time system. At a meeting in the spring of 1883 he had laid out two maps before the assembled officials that seemed to establish his case beyond doubt. One was a forest of colours showing almost fifty lines, as if scribbled by an angry child, and the other was a smooth display of four broad colour bars, running north to south, each fifteen degrees of longitude apart. Allen claimed that the new map carried all ‘the enlightenment we hope for in the future’.11 Allen was proposing a remarkable thing: that his continent’s timekeeping be based not on its national meridian, but on a meridian beyond its borders, and upon signals received by electric telegraph from the Royal Observatory at Greenwich.12
In the summer of 1883, Allen sent maps and details of his proposals to 570 railway company managers, and gained approval from the vast majority; he then supplied them with ‘translation tables’, to convert local time to standard. And so the familiar era of public timekeeping began at noon on Sunday, 18 November 1883, and the 49 previous time zones were reduced to four. Observing the transition from the Western Union Building in New York City, Allen noted, ‘the bells of St Paul’s strike on the old time. Four minutes later, obedient to the electrical signal from The Naval Observatory . . . local time was abandoned, probably forever.’
As in Europe, the railways’ strictures gradually spread to the locale in which they operated, and adhesion to the timetable on the tracks spread to all aspects of daily life. But, as in Europe, not every city delighted in the imposition of uniformity. Pittsburgh banned standard time until 1887, while Augusta and Savannah resisted until 1888. In Ohio, members of the Bellaire school board voted to adopt standard time and were promptly arrested on the orders of the city council. Detroit protested louder than most: although strictly part of the Central time zone, the city maintained local time (28 minutes behind Standard Time) until 1900. Henry Ford, who trained as a watch repairer before he revolutionised the car business, made and sold a watch that told both standard and local time simultaneously, and both remained in use until 1918.13
Towards the end of 1883, the Indianapolis Centennial noted that in the ultimate quarrel between man and nature, man had finally and irrevocably pulled ahead: ‘The sun is no longer to boss the job . . . The sun will be requested to rise and set by railroad time.’ At the heart of the newspaper’s distaste for this new system lay the diminishing role of the church and its bells calling congregants to prayer (and in effect the whole God-given scheme of things). ‘The planets must, in the future, make their circuits by such timetables as railroad magnates arrange . . . People will have to marry by railroad time.’14 A reporter in Cincinnati observed that ‘the longer a man is a commuter the more he grows to be a living timetable’.
The word ‘commuter’ was brand new (one who ‘commuted’ or shortened their journey). But the notion of the railway timetable, novel at the launch of the Liverpool and Manchester line in 1830, was by now ingrained in the soul.15 The first international railway timetable conference took place in Cologne in February 1872. Representatives from Austria, France, Belgium and Switzerland joined delegates from a newly unified Germany. The debate was both a simple and a complicated one: how to coordinate trains running across international borders to facilitate smooth travelling for passengers and freight and an efficient service by the operators? And then how to advertise this service in a way that would encourage and simplify this procedure? One of the most important agreements was how the timetable would be represented visually: it was decided to use roman numerals based on the 12-hour format. The conferences increased in number and productivity each year: the founding members were soon joined by Hungary, the Netherlands, Spain, Poland and Portugal, and the standardisation of time from London ensured that passengers increasingly made the right connections. The meetings were held twice a year, for summer and winter timetables, until the First World War brought cooperation and, in many cases, cross-border travel to an end. (War undid much that was noble about the railways; their potential facilitated modern warfare. The Duke of Wellington would surely have recognised their worth, as of course did Mussolini.16)
It won’t be so long before the train shifts its symbolic status as a model of speed and alarm to a model of sedateness; we shall soon see the car overtake it as the epitome of speed and stress. But first let us travel back to other tracks and tempos, and to charming old Austria, where a man with crazy hair is about to conduct a nervous orchestra.
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1 A neat loop: Hachette’s founder, Louis Hachette, founded his publishing and part-work empire on train station bookstalls in the 1820s, in the same manner as W.H. Smith.
2 When a statue, bound for King’s Cross, was cast in 2015 to mark the 75th anniversary of Gresley’s death, there was some controversy in the railway and duck press over whether a mallard should appear at his feet. The duck appeared in the early designs, but in the end, it was decided against.
3 At that very moment, the world record set by a steam train was still 124.5 mph, recorded two years earlier on a run between Hamburg and Berlin. The passengers on board, jubilant in their achievement, included Reinhard Heydrich and Heinrich Himmler. Hitler would hear of the news directly from Joseph Goebbels, who had drawn up the passenger list. The achievement was a victory not just for German engineering, but for Nazi supremacy.
4 Seasonably unreliable canals, the other slow method of transport at the birth of the railways, were principally for freight.
5 Paraphrased translation from ‘Histoire d’un crime’, 1877.
6 The actual journey on the opening day, 15 Se
ptember 1830, attended by the Duke of Wellington and other dignitaries, took a little longer, owing to the fatal accident involving William Huskisson, MP for Liverpool and a great local supporter of the new railway. A frail man who failed to gauge the time it would take for Rocket to travel up the track to where he was standing, he was struck by it as passengers milled around on the track and as the engines took on water midway in the journey. Oh, the symbolism of progress! At the time it was an easy mistake to make.
7 The disparity was evident northwards of London too: Leeds was 6 minutes and 10 seconds behind London; Carnforth was 11 minutes and 5 seconds behind; Barrow was 12 minutes and 54 seconds.
8 For some, the helter-skelter of railways represented merely one more unwelcome intrusion of the fast modern world. ‘What with railways, steamships, printing-presses it has surely become a most monstrous “tissue” this life of ours,’ Thomas Carlyle wrote from London to Ralph Waldo Emerson in America in 1835. He was horrified at ‘the roaring Loom of Time’, a reference to Goethe’s Faust. The printing press, it should be acknowledged, was by then 300 years old, and one wonders where the two authors would have been without it.
9 Or as the proclamation in the Reichstag stated, ‘The legal time in Germany is the solar mean time of the fifteenth degree latitude east of Greenwich.’
10 Parallel tracks: in the twenty-first century, the lines of ultra-fast fibre-optic cables used for high-frequency trading between, for example, stock exchanges and traders in New York and Chicago, followed the telegraph laid down by the railways some 150 years before.
11 He was building on the maverick ideas of Professor C.F. Dowd, the principal of Temple Grove Seminary for Young Ladies in Saratoga, New York, who first suggested separating the continent into four or more ‘time belts’.
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