U.S. railroads enact standard time zones

• Author: Allen Pusey
• Pages: 72-72

ABA JOURNAL | WINTER 2019-2020

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US Railroads Enact

Standard Time Zones

BY ALLEN PUSEY

At 7:20 a.m. on Aug. 12,

1853, a Providence &

Worcester Railroad train

left its Rhode Island station,

bound—as its name suggested—for

Worcester, Massachusetts . At around

the same time, a regularly sc heduled

P&W excursion train from the town of

Uxbridge , near Worcester, was rattling

toward Providence. By schedule and

design, the two trains were traveling to-

ward each other at the same time along

the same 45-mile stretch of single-line

track laid along the banks of the Black-

stone Canal.

Company rules required that at a

given time and place along the route,

the Providence-bound excursion train

would divert to a sidetrack to allow

the Worcester-bound train to pass. On

this particular day, the conductor on

the excursion train consulted his watch

and determined even though his train

was running slightly behind schedule,

he could still make it to the nearby side-

track in time to let the Worcester-bound

train safely pass. But he was mistaken,

and as the two trains rounded a curve

from different directions, they collided

head-on, killing 14 people and leaving

another 23 badly injured.

Within days, a coroner’s jury had

issued a report. The young conductor of

the excursion train, Frederick Putnam,

was charged with manslaughter. But

Putnam, it turned out, was not a con-

ductor; he was a brakeman assigned to

work as a conductor at a brakeman’s

lower salary. The watch he consulted

at the critical juncture, borrowed from

a milkman , had never been inspected

by the company and had never been

properly set for company time.

The P&W wreck was one of 11

major railroad accidents that killed 121

people in 1853. And as public depen-

dence on railroad lines proliferated,

safety was a growing concern.

In 1851, railroads reported 8,836

miles of operating track . In 1871, it

was 44,614 miles. By 1883, railroads

were hauling raw materials, foodstuffs,

 nished goods and people over more

than 110,000 miles of track running

coast to coast.

In New England, the P&W

collision provoked re-

newed attempts to

standardize train

scheduling. For

instance, just days

after the incident,

the Boston and

Providence Rail-

road ordered all

company clocks

and watches set

for two minutes

later than the time

set by a public clock

maintained by Wm.

Bond & Son, a Boston

clockmaker. They called it

“Standard Time.”

But for decades after the P&W

disaster, notions of time and timetables

remained local and, for the most part,

chaotic. Towns and cities sprouting

along the tracks set their own time—

often based on the local noon sun—

creating times that differed by critical

minutes from place to place. Rail com-

panies, in turn, set and reset timetables

by their own arbitrary methods, often

ignoring efforts to standardize.

Enter Charles F. Dowd, a school-

master at Temple Grove Seminary in

Saratoga Springs, New York. Dowd was

attracted to the issue of a national time,

a single time recognized from Boston to

San Francisco. But the idea was imprac-

tical—and probably unacceptable—in

a nation with such breadth that solar

noon would differ by as much as four

hours east to west.

Dowd turned to the idea of four

zones, each covering 15 degrees lon-

gitude, inside which all clocks would

be set to the same time. To make them

easily spaced and calculated, he suggest-

ed they be set at the 75th, 90th, 105th

and 120th meridians.

He began pitching his system to the

railroads in 1869 and followed in 1870

with a pamphlet detailing his system.

Still, there was resistance.

By 1883, railroads were

using 56 different time

standards to schedule

trains nationwide.

But in 1872,

railroad of cials

began to get

serious about

new time

zones, forming

the General

Time Conven-

tion, and by

October 1883,

they had agreed

on what appeared to

be Dowd’s concept of

four zones of standard time

running from east to west.

The new system, designed on a time

set by the U.S. Naval Observatory, took

effect on Nov. 18, 1883.

Although the railroads prospered

under the new system, much of the rest

of the nation continued to cling to local

solar-based times. It was not until 1918,

35 years later, that Congress enacted

of cial national time zones with the

Standard Time Act. Q

Precedents

Charles

Dowd

Photo by Record & Epler/Library of Congress

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Nov. 18, 1883