All about railways
Railways and the passage of time
“'Cause you just get
So many trips 'round the sun”
I don’t imagine for one minute that you would have expected me to quote a little-known (in the UK at least, so I don’t offend our American cousins) Country singer called Casey Musgraves. The song is called “Follow your arrow” if you are interested, and like almost everything else, is available on iTunes.
I have written about the life of a clock; how we record the passage of time fascinates me. The pages of a diary resemble the canvas of a tapestry; we decide what to sew onto it. Empty or busy, gaudy or plain, the choice is ours.
From the earliest times man would try to harness the most suitable time of day for his labours. This would extend outwards from that point in the day when the sun was at its height; let’s call that midday. Sometimes, this would then be too hot, but keep with me. Too cold and too dark in the early morning, too dangerous and too dark in the evening. Like Liverpool. (Ed.- are we far enough away from Liverpool to get away with this?)
People are often surprised to learn that it was the railways that gave us time. For the man in the east sees the sun at its height before the man in the west. Midday, as we have described it above, arrives sooner in Lowestoft than Penzance, by thirty minutes. So, towns and cities around Britain would set their clocks so as to suit their longitude. (Confused by latitude and longitude? I was, too. The up-and-down lines, running north to south, are all as long as each other. That’s longitude for you. Latitude is a festival.)
With the development of the railways, cities and towns, each with their own definition of time, were connected by travel that was faster than anything previously experienced, joining places to one another in hours rather than days as before. This produced unpredicted problems, as each railway company would use the time as it was at their headquarters, with trains converging, running according to different clocks; in some cases, trains seemed to arrive after the connections to other companies’ services had left, although passengers were still able to change trains and continue their journeys. Time warped at Crewe.
It was only just over a hundred and forty years ago that Britain arrived at a satisfactory solution in the form of the Definition of Time Act 1880 which gave us Greenwich Mean Time in Great Britain; Ireland used Dublin Mean Time, which was 25 minutes behind. For the first time, a clock in Norwich read the same as clocks in Birmingham, Bristol, and Truro. The trains met each other in synchrony. I used to think that Universal Time Constant, UTC, was introduced by the French in resentment at Britain employing “Greenwich” in the globally-accepted standard, but in fact UTC includes leap centuries in addition to leap years. One of Stacey’s trips round the sun takes a fraction over 365¼ days, so we have a fudge factor.
Daylight Saving Time followed in 1916, delivering apparently longer evenings and extending the working days of the munitions factories, along with considerable confusion; confounded further by King Edward VIII, who insisted on Sandringham Standard Time, 30 minutes away from GMT. More time to slaughter wildlife, one assumes. In Will Hay’s marvellous, black and white, Ealing Comedy “Oh! Mr Porter”, there is a delightful scene where he and his colleagues attempt to describe the movement of an hour from morning to evening by placing watches in sequence on the rail and shuffling them around, only for an unexpected train arrival (they had interpreted it wrongly, this being a comedy) crushing the watches under its wheels.
Bizarre implementations of Daylight Saving Time are not confined to these islands; I once had the privilege of serving in the Falkland Islands, a place of quite stunning natural beauty, clear skies, and outstanding trout fishing. I would go back if I could, and would urge you to visit if you can. The sense of history is palpable. The population numbers around 3,000 and is unequally distributed between the capital, Stanley, and the Camp; the latter term refers to the countryside and is derived from the Spanish, campo; a curious inflection given the relationship between those islands and their Spanish-speaking mainland neighbours, but there we are. Unbelievably, at that time Stanley and the Camp observed not just different time zones, but also different transitions to Daylight Saving Time. This caught me out when I travelled to Port Howard on West Falkland for the fishing in an unexpected break in duty on the eve, as I thought, of DST. I presented myself for breakfast as it was being cleared away. The hotelier explained, “We bring in Summer time separately to Stanley. It suits us better.”
So there we are; time on a global, national, local and, in the case of Port Howard, an almost personal, level. Be sure to enjoy all of yours.
For more on the history of time keeping I can thoroughly recommend Parallel Lines: Or, Journeys on the Railway of Dreams by Ian Marchant (ISBN: 9780747565840)
http://www.falklands.gov.fk/
So many trips 'round the sun”
I don’t imagine for one minute that you would have expected me to quote a little-known (in the UK at least, so I don’t offend our American cousins) Country singer called Casey Musgraves. The song is called “Follow your arrow” if you are interested, and like almost everything else, is available on iTunes.
I have written about the life of a clock; how we record the passage of time fascinates me. The pages of a diary resemble the canvas of a tapestry; we decide what to sew onto it. Empty or busy, gaudy or plain, the choice is ours.
From the earliest times man would try to harness the most suitable time of day for his labours. This would extend outwards from that point in the day when the sun was at its height; let’s call that midday. Sometimes, this would then be too hot, but keep with me. Too cold and too dark in the early morning, too dangerous and too dark in the evening. Like Liverpool. (Ed.- are we far enough away from Liverpool to get away with this?)
People are often surprised to learn that it was the railways that gave us time. For the man in the east sees the sun at its height before the man in the west. Midday, as we have described it above, arrives sooner in Lowestoft than Penzance, by thirty minutes. So, towns and cities around Britain would set their clocks so as to suit their longitude. (Confused by latitude and longitude? I was, too. The up-and-down lines, running north to south, are all as long as each other. That’s longitude for you. Latitude is a festival.)
With the development of the railways, cities and towns, each with their own definition of time, were connected by travel that was faster than anything previously experienced, joining places to one another in hours rather than days as before. This produced unpredicted problems, as each railway company would use the time as it was at their headquarters, with trains converging, running according to different clocks; in some cases, trains seemed to arrive after the connections to other companies’ services had left, although passengers were still able to change trains and continue their journeys. Time warped at Crewe.
It was only just over a hundred and forty years ago that Britain arrived at a satisfactory solution in the form of the Definition of Time Act 1880 which gave us Greenwich Mean Time in Great Britain; Ireland used Dublin Mean Time, which was 25 minutes behind. For the first time, a clock in Norwich read the same as clocks in Birmingham, Bristol, and Truro. The trains met each other in synchrony. I used to think that Universal Time Constant, UTC, was introduced by the French in resentment at Britain employing “Greenwich” in the globally-accepted standard, but in fact UTC includes leap centuries in addition to leap years. One of Stacey’s trips round the sun takes a fraction over 365¼ days, so we have a fudge factor.
Daylight Saving Time followed in 1916, delivering apparently longer evenings and extending the working days of the munitions factories, along with considerable confusion; confounded further by King Edward VIII, who insisted on Sandringham Standard Time, 30 minutes away from GMT. More time to slaughter wildlife, one assumes. In Will Hay’s marvellous, black and white, Ealing Comedy “Oh! Mr Porter”, there is a delightful scene where he and his colleagues attempt to describe the movement of an hour from morning to evening by placing watches in sequence on the rail and shuffling them around, only for an unexpected train arrival (they had interpreted it wrongly, this being a comedy) crushing the watches under its wheels.
Bizarre implementations of Daylight Saving Time are not confined to these islands; I once had the privilege of serving in the Falkland Islands, a place of quite stunning natural beauty, clear skies, and outstanding trout fishing. I would go back if I could, and would urge you to visit if you can. The sense of history is palpable. The population numbers around 3,000 and is unequally distributed between the capital, Stanley, and the Camp; the latter term refers to the countryside and is derived from the Spanish, campo; a curious inflection given the relationship between those islands and their Spanish-speaking mainland neighbours, but there we are. Unbelievably, at that time Stanley and the Camp observed not just different time zones, but also different transitions to Daylight Saving Time. This caught me out when I travelled to Port Howard on West Falkland for the fishing in an unexpected break in duty on the eve, as I thought, of DST. I presented myself for breakfast as it was being cleared away. The hotelier explained, “We bring in Summer time separately to Stanley. It suits us better.”
So there we are; time on a global, national, local and, in the case of Port Howard, an almost personal, level. Be sure to enjoy all of yours.
For more on the history of time keeping I can thoroughly recommend Parallel Lines: Or, Journeys on the Railway of Dreams by Ian Marchant (ISBN: 9780747565840)
http://www.falklands.gov.fk/
