Existing comment:
Railroads and Time:
For people living in the latter part of the nineteenth century, there can be no doubt of the tremendous impact railroads had on their daily lives and on the pulse of the country's economic, political and social processes -- especially for people in the remote, newly settled west. In the nineteenth century, doing things "railroad fashion" meant to do them thoroughly, efficiently and as fast as possible. The railroad quickly came to represent man's power over nature, a power that virtually "annihilated space and time." This phrase, used widely by writers of the period, articulated an overwhelming sense of the railroads's importance as a vehicle of change in how people saw the world around them.
With the completion of a transcontinental railway, marking and maintaining precision time became more important than ever before. Prior to standard railway time, each city and town had its own time, often connected to "sun time" which was based on the sun's movement across the sky. As rail lines crossed various local standard times, scheduling became increasingly complicated. Timetables and timekeepers, therefore, were essential parts of railroad operations.
The image of a conductor swinging out from the caboose, pocket watch in hand, became a familiar sight to Americans. A strong connection between railroads and timekeeping emerged and was strengthened as the nineteenth century gave way to the twentieth: railroad time became America's time. |