|
Railway time was the standardised time arrangement first applied by the Great Western Railway in England in November 1840, the first recorded occasion when different local times were synchronised and a single standard time applied. Railway time was progressively taken up by all railway companies in Great Britain over the following two to three years. The schedules by which trains were organised and the times station clocks displayed was brought in line with the local time for London or "London Time", the time set at Greenwich by the Royal Observatory, which was already widely known as Greenwich Mean Time (GMT). The development of railway networks in North America in the 1850s,〔Smithsonian's NMAH - Anniversary Exhibition Press Release 1999 ("Standard Time in America" ) - Retrieved March 4, 2008.〕 India in around 1860,〔Kosambi, Meera (“Bombay Time in Intersections: Socio-cultural Trends in Maharashtra p161 ISBN 978-81-250-1878-0 Orient Longman (2000)” )- Retrieved March 4, 2008.〕 and in Europe prompted the introduction of standard time influenced by geography, industrial development and political governance. The key purpose behind introducing railway time was twofold: to overcome the confusion caused by having non-uniform local times in each town and station stop along the expanding railway network and to reduce the incidence of accidents and near misses, which were becoming more frequent as the number of train journeys increased. The railway companies sometimes faced concerted resistance from local people who refused to adjust their public clocks to bring them into line with London Time. As a consequence two different times would be displayed in the town and in use, with the station clocks and the times published in train timetables differing by several minutes from that on other clocks. Despite this early reluctance, railway time rapidly became adopted as the default time across the whole of Great Britain, although it took until 1880 for the government to legislate on the establishment of a single Standard Time and a single time zone for the country.〔Davies, Peter E ("History of Railway Time" ) - ''Reproduced from original article on http://www.carnforth-station.co.uk/ ''- Retrieved March 4, 2008.〕 Some contemporary commentators referred to the influence of railway time on encouraging greater precision in daily tasks and the demand for punctuality. == Historical background == Until the latter part of the 18th century, time was normally determined in each town by a local sundial. Solar time is calculated with reference to the relative position of the sun. This provided only an approximation as to time due to variations in orbits and had become unsuitable for day-to-day purposes. It was replaced by local mean time, which eliminated the variation due to seasonal differences and anomalies. It also took account of the longitude of a location and enabled a precise time correction to be applied. Such new-found precision did not overcome a different problem, the differences between the local time of neighbouring towns. In Britain, local time differed by up to 20 minutes from that of London. For example, Oxford Time was 5 minutes behind Greenwich Time, Leeds Time 6 minutes behind, Carnforth, 11 minutes behind, and Barrow almost 13 minutes behind.〔(Greenwich mean time - Railway time ), Accessed 14-10-2011〕 In India and North America these differences could be 60 minutes or more. Almanacs containing tables were published and instructions attached to sundials to enable the differences between local times to be computed.〔Walker, Phil - Sundial Website ("Inscription attached to Sundial - Lilleshall Shropshire, England" ) - Retrieved March 4, 2008.〕 Before the arrival of the railway, journeys between these centres and the larger towns en route would take many hours or days, and these differences could be dealt with by adjusting the hands of the watch periodically. In Britain, the coaching companies published schedules providing details of the corrections required. However, this variation in local times was large enough to present problems for the railway schedules. For instance, Leeds time was six minutes behind London, whilst Bristol was ten minutes behind; sunrise for towns to the east such as Norwich occurred several minutes ahead of London. It soon became apparent that even such small discrepancies in times caused confusion, disruption, or even accidents. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Railway time」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
|