Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe Comparing Time ...

Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe railroad conductor George E. Burton and engineer J.W. Edwards comparing time before pulling out of Corwith railroad yard for Chillicothe, Illinois; Chicago, Ill.

Before railways in the 1800s, all time was local. Noon was simply when the sun was directly overhead wherever you were, in what is called solar time. Each town's citizens would set their clocks and pocket watches according to the official town clock or timekeeper. When they traveled to another town, they would simply change their watch when they arrived.

One of the first reported incidents which brought about a change in how time was organised on railways in the United States arose in New England  in August 1853. Two trains on the same track and heading towards each other collided as each of the train guards had different times set on their watches, resulting in the death of 14 passengers. Railway schedules were co-ordinated in New England shortly after this incident. 

Numerous other collisions led to the setting up of the General Time Convention, a committee of railway companies to agree on train scheduling.

In 1870 Charles F. Dowd  proposed A System of National Times for Railroads which involved a single time for railways but the keeping of local times for towns. Although this did not find favour with railway managers, in 1881 they eventually agreed for the idea to be investigated by William Frederick Allen Secretary of the General Time Convention and Managing Editor of the Travellers' Official Guide to the Railways. He proposed a modified solution by replacing the 50 different railway times by five time zones. He eventually persuaded the railway managers and the politicians running the cities that had several railway terminals, that it was in their interests to speedily adopt his simpler proposals which aligned the zones with cities railroad stations.

Right to the end there was opposition expressed by many smaller towns and cities, to the imposition of railway time. For example, in Indianapolis the report in the daily Sentinel for November 17 1883 protested that people would have to… “eat sleep work… and marry by railroad time”.  However, with the support of nearly all railway companies, most cities and influential observatories such as Yale and Harvard this collaborative approach led to standard railway time being introduced at noon on November 18 1883.

This consensus held and was only incorporated into federal law in 1918.

About Jack Delano:

Delano was born as Jacob Ovcharov in Voroshilovka, 120 miles southwest of Kiev, Ukraine and moved, with his parents and younger brother, to the United States in 1923. Between 1924 and 1932 he studied graphic arts and photography and music at the Settlement Music School and solfeggio with a professor from the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

After being awarded an art scholarship for his talents, he attended the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA) where from 1928 until 1932 he studied illustration and continued his musical training. While there Delano was awarded the Kesson traveling fellowship which he took to Europe where he bought a camera that got him interested in photography.

Jack Delano was Russian-born photographer who lived from August 1, 1914 to August 12, 1997.

Delano moved to the United States during the Great Depression, when he began taking photographs for the Farm Security Administration. In addition to his FSA work Delano is known for the striking color photographs he took at rail yards during the 1940s.