With us chafing at time zones and daylight saving time (DST) these days, it can be easy to forget how much more confusing things were in the late 19th century. Back then few areas had synchronized their clocks to something like Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) or other standards like London time or Paris time, with everyone instead running on local time determined by as solar time. This created a massive headache for the railways, as they somehow had to make their time schedules work across what were effectively hundreds of tiny time zones while ensuring that passengers got on their train on time.
In a recent video [The Tim Traveller] explains how the creation of so-called Railway time sort-of solved this in France. As railroads massively expanded across the world by the 1850s and travel times dropped rapidly, this concept of Railway time was introduced from the US to Europe to India, creating effectively a railway-specific time zone synchronized to e.g. London time in the UK and Paris time in France. In addition to this, French railways also set the clocks inside the stations to run five minutes behind, to give travelers even more of a chance to get to their train on time when stuck in a long goodbye.
By 1911, across Europe GMT was adopted as the central time base, and the French five minute delay was eliminated as French travelers and trains were now running perfectly on time.
“… Deutsche Bahn, who add a random delay to each actual arrival and departure time so that time becomes very relative indeed.”… wait, what? Never heard or experienced this.
Is this just connecting trains waiting for the arriving train – combined with the fashionable bashing of DB?
That was clearly meant as a joke, which unfortunately one of our editors didn’t get. It’s been removed.
Meanwhile in the UK someone rolls a dice to determine if a train will even turn up at all…
If they roll a six, you get a rail replacement bus instead.
You can dice an onion but you can’t roll a dice.
They had a bad run, about a year ago.
Germans aren’t used to it, so they ran around like the sky was falling.
My ride on the s-bahn was fine, not so schnel, more Acela than Bullet (200km/h top speed, Frankfurt to Munich).
oh no, DB is famous famous for running late, reserved wagons not existing, or routing trains to the wrong stations (like opposite end of Germany). To the point were even the operators inside the train joke on the announcements that they have no clue what’s going on. Not only last year.
That video thumbnail (which also appears in the video itself) is hilarious, with big numbers 1887 but WITH MODERN CARS IN IT! Was it that difficult to crop the image, was it that difficult to google for a more original/old image. It’s not as funny as a spaceship stormtrooper hitting his head on the ceiling, but it made me smile nonetheless.
Regarding the story it is a fascinating bit of history.
Irony ?
Sarcasm.