MARK YOUR CALENDARS AND SAVE THE DATE!

Date: Saturday, September 27, 2025
Time: 2:00 PM
Topic: "Railroad Time Service" The Impact of Railroads on Timekeeping in America
Speakers: Mid-South Chapter members H. Glen Kitts and Sherry Kitts
Location: Leeds Historic Depot
901 Thornton Avenue NE
Leeds, Alabama 35094

FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC

Description: The "Railroad Time Service" which lasted about 150 years, was a system of rules and regulations that developed over time to ensure the safety and efficiency of railroad operations in North America. Stringent programs for inspection and certification were developed to verify timepieces' conformity to the railroads' quality and reliability specifications. Additionally, Standard Time Zones and Standard Time with which we are familiar -- and take for granted today -- originated with the railroads in their effort to simplify coordination of schedules over the expanding east-west trackage of multiple operators.

Early on, the railroads' primary safety system consisted of a standard of time, station clocks and watches, and the timetable with its associated operating rules, all of which defined a time-interval method of operation. Accordingly, time service rules were developed to define Standard Time, watch and clock requirements, and a system of regular inspection and documentation to ensure that employees' watches were reliable.

In the early 1850s, the telegraph began to change the primary means of traffic control, the printed timetable. Train orders, which countermanded the time table, could now be transmitted to conductors and engineers via station agents to direct new meeting and passing points when opposing trains were late for a scheduled "meet." This capability also proved beneficial when a faster train needed to overtake a slower one traveling in the same direction. Although this system of telegraphed train orders could safely increase a single track's capacity enormously, decades would pass before all railroads adopted the practice.

In the late 1800s, the railroads started converting to space-interval safety, though thousands of miles remained single-track and unprotected by line-side signals, largely as a consequence of the expense attributed to their installation and maintenance. Neither the development of the telegraph nor line-side signals, each made possible by 19th century technological advances in electrical science, diminished the importance of having the correct time, which continued to be the primary margin of safety for the railroads.

Gradually, two mid-20th century advances in: (1) timekeeping--synchronous electric clocks and the advent of quartz-accuracy wristwatches--and (2) traffic control--Centralized Traffic Control, Automatic Block Signals and radio dispatching--all but spelled the doom of previously esteemed mechanical timepieces. By this time, the railroads had begun liquidating their mechanical clocks, and mechanical watches were rapidly becoming relics of the past. No longer regarded as the vanguard of safety, the (Railroad Time Service) was relegated to the dustbin of history, and the railroads discontinued this practice one-by-one. Today's major rail lines depend on high-tech signal systems, computer-assisted dispatching, and digitally enhanced locomotive cab displays and controls; however, radio communication remains an integral component of today's railroad operations.