Talk:Railway time

Untitled

I'm concerned with the hijacking of the article by Railway Time in Britain. It should neutrally reflect all countries in the intro as well as the rest of the article. =Nichalp «Talk»= 18:03, 4 March 2008 (UTC)

As indicated when I posted notes on your talk page and also on Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Tamil Nadu I requested input from all those with specific knowledge on RT particularly elsewhere than Britain. I quote from my post "....... I am not I should add an expert on Railways or Time but have an interest in Local History and Science and have long been intrigued by the story of railway time. I have done some reading/ research and feel its a story worth recording. So I would very much welcome input on the page from TN project members about railway time in India and others on the at present incomplete 'article in progress' of course once loaded. Thanks"........

I think "highjacked" is an very unfair charge. This was not an existing article but one I created from scratch, very much a first stab for others to collaborate with. As I said above I saw the article as work in progress and the story incomplete and in need of input from others. Having accessed what I have so far discovered available on the www and my local library I have found plenty about the use of the term "Railway Time" and its introduction before anywhere else in relation to Britain but to be frank I was disappointed with the little information so far about how RT took hold elsewhere in the world. What I have found I have used and referenced viz Madras and North America. I have no other access to any 'restricted access' material from India /North America or elsewhere where RT may indeed be discussed in more detail. It did strike me when reading material about India and North America the importance of the railways and use of the term 'Railway Time' was in the way it was written typically overshadowed by the story on the local and global legal establishment of "standard time" and of the setting up of multiple "time zones" but as these are separate subjects and already dealt with in their own articles it was inappropirate to stray into talking about these.

Please can you help me to unlock the story about railway time from outside GB.Tmol42 (talk)

military issues

I am a little surprised to see no mention of military issues, especially in relation to the US Civil War, where railway co-ordination was critical, as well as other coordination problems. I have no information to provide, but will try to follow up Feroshki (talk) 09:52, 25 December 2009 (UTC)

link rot setting in?

This ref is broken: ? Giles, Bill - BBC Weather A-Z - "Zulu Time - The Definition of Time Act is enacted" - Retrieved March 4, 2008. Cormullion (talk) 17:35, 4 August 2011 (UTC)

That's what happens with online links, they inevitably break. The paragraph using that link wasn't entirely accurate anyway, as GMT wasn't universally adopted in 1884; rewritten and re-sourced. Malleus Fatuorum 18:24, 4 August 2011 (UTC)

could differ?

For example, in Britain, local times for London, Birmingham, Bristol and Manchester, could differ by as much as 16 to 20 minutes.

Could? Does the difference vary seasonally?

Any objection to naming the eastern– and western-most major cities in Britain and stating the difference in local time between them? —Tamfang (talk) 07:05, 13 October 2011 (UTC)

I think the author of the original sentence is trying to say that, before the arrival of the railways, the time shown on the clocks (rather than Local Solar Time) varied depending on the whims of the clock managers in the various locations. So you might alight from a train to find that your accurately set watch was suddenly adrift by some minutes. If that's the original intent (implied by that 'could' rather than 'can'?) perhaps the phrasing could be tweaked. Can't see the benefit of mentioning the eastern and western-most cities, though. There are no services between Lowestoft and Penzance, to my knowledge. Technically the 12 minute difference was of sufficient importance at Bristol... Cormullion (talk) 15:38, 14 October 2011 (UTC)

As the original author I plead guilty to any confusion due to the wording which I have revised and added some examples. 'Could' was used as the time differences were conditional on distances between two points of reference nothing to do with the seasons nor the whims of the clock managers but on the position of the sun. So when it was estimated to be at its highest point it was noon which only needed to be approximate as it would enable only those for which it mattered, in the same town, to set their timepieces in order to make appointments with each other. For most inhabitants in the first part of the 19th century such precision did not matter day to day, and in any case they would not have possessed a watch or bea able to 'read the time' anymore tha they could read a book anyway.

External links modified (January 2018)

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Railway time and society

I removed this false claim:

Thomas Hardy in A Pair of Blue Eyes makes specific reference to railway time and its effect on seemingly contracting human time.

The novel makes no reference to railway time. There is a brief discussion near the start of chapter XIV of clock time versus human time, but the discussion would apply with as much force to local mean time as it would to zone time. The false claim is referenced to:

Gilmartin, Sophie "Ancestry and Narrative in Nineteenth-Century British Literature: Blood Relations from Edgeworth to Hardy p224 - Retrieved March 4

but the reference does not substantiate the claim: "railway time" is an idea that Gilmartin brings from outside the text to analyze it, and I do not think that she means "railway time" in the sense of this Wikipedia article. In my opinion she is using it metaphorically to mean something like "the changed sense of time that the mobility of the railways brought to formerly remote communities". Gdr 10:34, 10 April 2019 (UTC)

Image in lede - the clock is broken

What's the time?...

...It's railway time!

The image in the lede (reproduced here, File:Paddington Station Clock.jpg shows one face with the time at 12:40 and the other at 5:08. (Its only other use on EN:WP is in the London Paddington station § Gallery.) This could be misleading on this article, indeed initially I thought it was intended to demonstrate the difference between mean (railway) time and local time, as The Exchange clock at Bristol does (further down in the article, File:Exchangeclock.JPG). I think that would make for a better "signature" image. 85.238.91.38 (talk) 15:30, 27 September 2020 (UTC)

Sounds good to me. Go for it. I can't think why anyone would object. --Blurryman (talk) 22:34, 27 September 2020 (UTC)

Lede image is highly misleading, as the article is about railway time, not railway clocks. Is there any reason for using an image of a broken clock, other than to give the false impression that the two times shown are London and local time? Obscurasky (talk) 16:51, 14 February 2021 (UTC)

Agreed. Now done. Blurryman (talk) 01:05, 25 February 2021 (UTC)

18th century?

It says "latter part of the 18th century", but the rest of the article seems to suggest Railway Time was introduced in mid 1800s. Should it say 19th century? Or was there some intermediate situation from ~1750? Ukslim (talk) 08:37, 28 September 2023 (UTC)

convention of sign

Clock on The Exchange, Bristol, showing two minute hands, one for London time (GMT) and one for Bristol time (GMT +11 minutes).

In this caption I changed ‘+’ to ‘minus’; this was reverted. Help me understand why. At 12:30 in London it's 12:19 in Bristol, no? By what axioms is 30+11 = 19?

Are the notations in Time zone all backward? —Tamfang (talk) 09:30, 29 September 2023 (UTC)

Apologies, you are right and I am wrong.--TedColes (talk) 09:34, 29 September 2023 (UTC)