The Railways: Nation, Network and People

by Simon Bradley

A real Mr Harding in London and a real Archdeacon Grantly in Salisbury in the 1850s would have heard the public clocks striking at the same time. Any time-conscious traveller who got out of the train at Basingstoke, roughly halfway between those cities, would (up to 1852 at least) have encountered a puzzling anomaly: the railway kept to standard time, but the town clocks were on the local version, about five minutes faster. This brings up the matter of how the railways transformed the keeping of time itself. Before Victoria’s reign, time was a local matter. East Anglian clocks were several minutes ahead of London’s, those of the West Country and Wales quite a few minutes behind, all measured in accordance with the twenty-four-hour rotation of the earth. The exactitude of these calculations was a sign of sophistication rather than backwardness, the culmination of centuries of scientific clock-making and astronomical observation. The differences could be substantial – Plymouth time was twenty minutes behind that of London – but the practical difficulties that resulted were few. Those most conscious of the disparities included the guards of mail coaches, who carried watches that could be adjusted to gain or lose the correct number of minutes every twenty-four hours. The time observed on the coach could thus be kept in step with that of the towns it passed through.