Time Railways: The Making of a Nation

This is Perranporth, north Cornwall, where the local time,

according to this sundial, is 9am.

But my watch, set to

Greenwich Mean Time, says it's 21 minutes later.

So, which one's right?

The answer is both of them.

Until, that is, the Victorians came along and did this.

Railways changed everything.

The way we worked, the way we

played, and even the way we told the time.

Before trains, our country was made up of different local time zones,

not ideal for running a national network.

The rail companies wanted Britain to step to a new beat,

creating a precise world of timetables and schedules,

but this would be no easy ride.

Not everyone was so keen to keep time with the new age of steam.

Stations are remarkable places, bristling with energy,

everybody going somewhere, all in a hurry.

At the heart of things here at Paddington Station is this,

the clock - essential not just for passengers rushing to catch trains,

but for the whole railway network.

Without accurate timekeeping, railways just don't work.

And so it was for the Victorians, who built most of our railways.

Before they could get our trains to run on time,

they had to master time itself.

At the start of the 19th century,

the time in your town would vary

compared with the time in the next town.

You'd be woken by the sun, essentially.

There was no real problem with that, because travelling was slow.

There was no such thing as fast telecommunications,

so you'd keep your time in your town and that was fine.

And since the fastest way of getting from A to B was a mail coach,

top speed about 10mph, this muddled system didn't matter.

But by the mid-1830s, Britain wanted to go faster,

so they turned to people like

Isambard Kingdom Brunel to make that happen.

-ANNOUNCEMENT:

-11:06 Great Western railway service to Plymouth...

Brunel was commissioned by a group of Bristol businessmen to create

a railway to rival those up North,

but they didn't just want any old railway,

they wanted the fastest railway in the world.

Today's Great Western Railway follows exactly the same route

as he laid out, and I'm taking the train to Bristol.

So, Eleni, Brunel was tasked with developing a railway that was fast

and a smooth ride, but what was his starting point?

Brunel was already thinking about the railways from the early 1830s.

He could actually draw a perfect circle, and in 1831,

when he rides on the Liverpool and Manchester railway,

he tries to see how he can draw that perfect circle,

as you can see here in his sketchbook,

to test the smoothness of the line.

Well, you can see from this drawing it's not particularly smooth at all,

obviously, cos his circles are all over the place.

But how did he actually make this railway of his fast and smooth?

Well, Brunel decided to take a step away from what the other railways

were trying to achieve,

so the Great Western Railway was going to be about passengers,

but also about speed and efficiency.

So Brunel implemented a network of bridges, viaducts, tunnels

in order to ensure the smoothness

and the speed of this innovative railway.

Brunel's line was fast, with its smooth level route

and powerful locomotives like the Firefly and Iron Duke,

speeds of 50mph became routine.

But there was a catch.

Since British towns and cities all kept their own local time,

the further west you went, the

further back you had to set your watch.

Not a problem when the mail coach

took all day to complete its journey,

but now, with London to Bristol in four hours,

things started to get very confusing.

So, the engineers encountered something of a problem

crossing time zones?

That's right, and Brunel seems to be aware of that.

There is a note in his fact book during the period when he's working

on the Great Western Railway

where there is a note indicating all the different stations,

all the way from Paddington to Exeter, alongside the Greenwich time

and the time difference alongside those cities.

So crossing these different time zones basically means that you're

going to have to adjust your time to meet the time of the place

where you arrive at. That's totally confusing, isn't it?

It's very confusing. You're basically going back in time,

and it does not really fit in or satisfy Brunel's vision for this

innovative, wonderful railway.

It was a muddle, but the solution was simple.

The whole of Brunel's railway adopted one time zone

taking its time from Greenwich in London,

established by King Charles II as

the home of timekeeping and navigation.

So, by the time the last part of the Great Western Railway was opened

here to Bristol in June 1841,

the train arriving and the station it was arriving at

were perfectly synchronised.

The idea was soon taken up by other companies,

and railway time was born.

But keeping the network in sync with Greenwich was no easy task.

In the early days, there was no electric telegraph,

there was no electric clocks,

so it would've been carried by specially made and well-guarded

pocket watch carried by mail guards on the trains.

However, running a railway on one single time zone

created a new problem.

Stations were now out of sync with the towns and cities they were in.

A confusion exposed the every first time the London train

arrived at Bristol.

A party of Bristol dignitaries was supposed to meet the passengers

arriving off the train,

but with their watches set to Bristol rather than London time,

they arrived ten minutes too late.

They'd missed the train.

The solution was that was so bizarre you'd be forgiven for thinking

it was April Fool's Day.

A clock. A clock with two minute hands. One set to London time,

the other to Bristol time,

ten minutes and 23 seconds behind London.

Today, the clock still shows Greenwich Mean Time in red

and Bristol time in black.

This is a quality clock built as a regulator, it was made in 1819.

It's got quite a number of wheels,

rather more wheels than a clock would normally have.

The reason being you've got bigger pinions,

which are the small gear wheels, and that means there's less friction,

so less friction means it can be a better timekeeper.

It's got another feature - there's a maintainer, as it's called,

so that when you wind up the clock it'll keep it running so it doesn't

lose a few minutes while you wind it up,

and people would have relied on this as this was the one that was chosen

to represent the time, local time in Bristol.

For a 200-year-old clock... Well, almost 200-year-old,

does it still keep good time?

It keeps as good time as any pendulum clock can.

It'll be within half a minute a week,

which, in this day and age, you may not think is particularly good

timekeeping, but that was pretty outstanding at the time,

and the double minute hand was because, when the railway came to

Bristol - that was 1841 - the railway ran on Greenwich time,

so anyone who wanted to catch the

train in Bristol relying on local time,

which this clock would've shown as the important main Bristol public

timekeeper, they would arrive for the train just over ten minutes too

late, and if the train was on time, well, tough.

So, the solution was, a year later, to add an additional minute hand,

so one showed local time and the other showed railway time.

As absurd as it seems now,

having the clock with two minute hands was quite a canny solution,

but it also exposed Britain's

increasingly chaotic approach to time.

Things weren't much easier for those who had mastered railway time.

Negotiating the right train meant using baffling time sheets,

like this one, with endless variations

published by different railway companies.

But beyond the escalating confusion,

there was help for the Victorian traveller

in the form of Bradshaw's timetables.

George Bradshaw was a Quaker and cartographer from Manchester.

His little booklets of railway times, first published in 1839,

would endure for 100 years.

What he realised is that there was a need for a compendium

of all of these timing sheets for the benefit of the public.

They were known as companions and they were made small enough,

very small, so that it was possible for the purchaser just to pop it

into their pocket or into their handbag or what-have-you.

Were they easy to use?

What made it much easier to use was that Bradshaw introduced a new form

of presentation - a time table - and the timetable used two axes.

The Y axis was the list of the stations,

and then along the X axis was the actual time.

The main benefit, of course, was in connections.

So, if you had to change trains then you could do that in the knowledge

that the train would arrive at a particular time and then you had

a certain number of minutes to catch

your next train on to your destination.

How popular were Bradshaw's companions?

They were very popular, because it was the one source that people could

obtain knowledge about the developing railway system,

because the routes that were being added in the late 1830s and all the

way through the 1840s was quite astonishing.

Then the little companion became extremely helpful

and it grew with time.

This is one of the very, very earliest ones, it's very thin.

You just take it down to 1844 and you can see...

-That's more than double.

-It's more than double in thickness.

That reflects the opening of so many railways

during the course of those few years.

Having expanded so fast, the network was finding itself stretched,

and the service often fell short of what was in the book.

What were people's reactions when there were delays?

I think they were just as grumpy then as we are today,

I mean, inevitably.

Whereas before the railways came, time wasn't actually very important.

People lived their lives without constant reference to clocks and

watches, but as soon as you introduce timetables,

strict timetables, then people's expectations rose.

They expected that if a train is going to leave at 11,

that it leaves at 11,

and if it arrives at 12, that it will arrive at 12.

Loved, hated, frequently satirised,

Bradshaw's companions became firmly embedded in Victorian culture.

Even Charles Dickens complained that...

'The smallest child in the neighbourhood who can tell the clock

'is now convinced it hasn't the time to say "20 minutes to 12",

'but comes back and jerks out like a little Bradshaw,

"11:40".'

Bradshaw's timetables are a beautiful example

of a Victorian Britain that was efficient and perfectly

synchronised. Of course, this was far from the truth.

While rail companies were choosing to follow Greenwich Mean Time during

the 1840s, beyond the railways,

Britain was still a hotchpotch of different time zones.

One man determined to sort this mess out was another railway pioneer,

Henry Booth.

Having established Greenwich Mean Time on his railway,

the Liverpool and Manchester line,

Booth felt that the whole of society would benefit from one unified time,

so he took his case to Parliament.

So, this pamphlet that he created and sent to his MP

was quite humorous and also quite patriotic

in terms of its sort of rallying cry and vision.

He talked about the "mighty people" of Great Britain

really, sort of, being unified.

It contained some of the funny situations of travelling east

to west that the timetables of the time,

the Bradshaw's timetables that were so frequently used...

It looked like it was a quicker journey travelling from east to west

than it was from west to east.

And that's obviously preposterous.

And so he highlighted this by saying that the Bradshaws

were the standard for the whole country

and yet so many facts and fallacies were intermingled,

that it was just not worth the paper it was written on.

And then he talks a bit about his vision for the country,

so he says that he wanted the bells of St Paul's to ring out at

one o'clock in the afternoon,

for the bells to also ring out in England, Wales and Scotland.

For many people, it didn't really matter.

They were quite happy with the convenience that it brought,

the ease of use of railway timetables, for instance,

but for some people it did matter,

because actually the time on our clocks is more

than just a convenience.

You know, there's politics involved here as well, and so if you...

If you're quite proud, if you're a proud city or a proud nation later,

the idea of somebody else's time regulating your business might seem

to be a little bit... A little bit off, a little bit unacceptable.

So, for some people it felt a little bit like what was sometimes called

railway aggression - the idea that, you know,

the metropolis could bring their time and we march to their beat.

Booth's proposals for standardising time met with resistance.

By 1851, over ten years on from the initial introduction

of Greenwich time on railways,

many cities were still proudly refusing to update

their local time to match. Cities like Exeter.

Here, a group of powerful businessmen, led by the mayor,

signed a petition calling for Greenwich Mean Time

to replace Exeter local time, some

14 minutes and 12 seconds behind London.

But they faced opposition from an altogether higher power.

In Exeter, timekeeping was a Church matter.

The city set its watches by the cathedral bell,

which stuck rigidly to local time.

CHURCH BELL CHIMES

So, this is the clock by which Exeter time was set.

Indeed, this is our wonderful medieval astronomical clock which

has the Earth at the centre.

It's a fabulous survivor from the Middle Ages.

And it's famous for another reason, isn't it?

Well, yes, it's said that this is where the nursery rhyme

Hickory-Dickory-Dock comes from, because there's access

up to the back of the clock which a mouse could easily do

to eat the fat off the ropes and things,

and there's a cat flap at the bottom to enable the cat to go chase it,

and the cathedral kept a cat for that purpose.

But that was the key clock in Exeter,

from which all other clocks took their time.

And it was decided in court that this was

the official timepiece for Exeter.

And was there a particular legal case that established who had the

right to the time?

Well, sort of. There was a case about a woman coming of age and,

because the cathedral clock was 14 minutes later than Greenwich time,

as it was called then, the case went to court to decide when she came of

age, and it was decided that this

was legally the official timepiece for Exeter.

And they really took it so seriously as to go to court?

Very seriously.

Churches have always been the keepers of time

in a lot of respects.

But with the arrival of the railway,

the cathedral's monopoly on time was coming under fire.

I've got a letter here from the town clerk of the city,

dated October 1851.

"Resolved that the Mayor be requested to confer

"with the Dean and Chapter

"on the propriety of altering the clocks of the city

"so that they indicate Greenwich time."

It's quite short and to the point, isn't it?

Very short and to the point.

So, what was the Dean's response to this?

Well, Deans are very good at resisting pressure,

and the Dean at the time did exactly that.

Just held out for a while after that.

But effectively just said no.

The standoff would drag on for a whole year

until the arrival of another great innovation of the industrial age -

the electric telegraph.

This had been evolving hand-in-hand with the new railways,

but now, and for years to come, it's importance became truly apparent

through the impact it had on safety,

like here on the South Devon Railway,

a branch-line of the Great Western.

If you go right back to the early days of signalling,

they used to use policemen.

A signalman to this day is still nicknamed Bobby.

And they would stand at the edge of a track like this, with their flag,

and they would actually control trains going in.

This was referred to as the time interval system.

You let one train go and then you wouldn't let another one go

until a certain period of time had elapsed.

Which was all very well as long as the one in front didn't, erm...

didn't stop for some reason, which sometimes they did,

and hence you got accidents.

Fatal crashes had become so commonplace that they threatened the

future of the railways.

But now the electric telegraph would come to the rescue.

In 1838, a pilot section ran along 13 miles

of the Great Western Railway from London.

It was so successful it was soon rolled out across the country,

and the legacy of that network is still in operation.

Signalmen, like Frank, use a complex language of bell codes

triggered by the telegraph to communicate with other signal boxes

down the line.

So, Frank, once the telegraph was established,

how much of a difference did it really make?

It made a tremendous amount of difference.

It would be virtually impossible to run the system we do now without

communication of some sort.

The whole history of signalling on the rail,

particularly the Tyer's electric token,

which is still in use here today.

There are three safeguards to ensure that this happens.

One is that you get a thing called a token from the instrument

in the signal box.

The driver must carry that. That's golden rule number one.

Secondly, you have fixed signals to control the movements of trains.

Third thing is, although the driver is driving the engine,

the person in charge of the train is the guard,

and he also has a duty to monitor the operation of signals

and if he sees the driver going past a red light

he can put the brake on from his van, completely independent.

Those three things between them, basically,

are what guarantees safety on a single line.

WHISTLE BLOWS

The telegraph undoubtedly made railway travel safer

and it made it faster, but it was where the telegraph would go next

that would leave an even longer-lasting legacy.

In 1844,

a wonderfully eccentric five-needle telegraph had brought news of the

birth of Queen Victoria's fourth child, one letter at a time.

And a year later, a murderer,

John Torwell, absconding by train, was caught when a description of him

was sent down the line to Paddington.

The public marvelled at what the newspapers called

"the electric constable".

Soon even clocks were being controlled via the telegraph,

synchronising them with Greenwich.

This was revolutionary and radical,

and when the electric telegraph started distributing time signals

along the railway network,

it was harder and harder for the people to resist this advance,

if you like, of railway time, London time, Greenwich time.

And it became more and more widely used in correcting public clocks.

The telegraph was driving forward the timekeeping revolution

that the railways had begun.

In Exeter, the cathedral finally lost its monopoly on time.

The city wound its clocks forward 14 minutes,

and Exeter local time was lost forever.

As the telegraph followed the growing railway network,

the march toward one standard time picked up pace.

What's more, the British public could communicate like never before.

What had taken days by mail coach, and hours by train,

was now almost instantaneous.

By the end of the century there would be 15,000 telegraph sets like

this one, sending an early version of text messages across the country.

Now it would leap beyond our shores to cross oceans and continents,

as Britain fought to maintain and grow her empire.

A worldwide network of undersea cables was laid from Porthcurno

in Cornwall, connected to telegraph lines that traced British railways

across colonial territories.

So, when was the overseas telegraph connection to Porthcurno?

When did that happen?

Well, that came in in 1870,

and that link was from Porthcurno to Carcavelos, just outside Lisbon,

and that was part of a chain that then went on through Gibraltar,

Malta, through the Mediterranean,

and eventually right out to what was then called Bombay in India.

Up until that point, communication from this country to India

or, indeed, any other part of the British empire,

could take six or eight weeks.

The electric telegraph and the undersea communication

meant that this country could communicate

with India in nine minutes.

And, of course, that radically changed the way in which

this country controlled the empire.

In its heyday, there were 14 cables that connected to other parts of the

world, and it was the hub of communication for this country,

for the British empire,

and really one of the most important cable stations in the world.

Communication, spread through the telegraph,

brought even greater control across the empire

with infrastructure powered by British-built railways.

And bringing the wealth back home,

a merchant navy using Greenwich time as its standard.

Finally, in 1880, 40 years after railway time was first used,

the government passed the Definition Of Time Act...

..and the time we have today was put into law.

But that's not quite the whole story.

In 1884, a huge conference in Washington DC,

attended by very many countries in the world,

came together to solve one problem,

which was to choose a single prime meridian for the world.

Now, Greenwich was chosen as that prime meridian after

many, many days of discussions and arguments,

and it certainly wasn't inevitable that Greenwich would've been chosen,

but it was chosen because, actually for a very practical reason,

that most of the charts used by ships on the seas at that time

used Greenwich time as their meridian.

Therefore, it inconvenienced the fewest people to use Greenwich

for our prime meridian for the world.

But, as with the use of Greenwich time for British towns and cities

in the 1840s and 1850s,

in the 1880s the use of Greenwich time for other countries

looked to many like an act of aggression, an act of imperialism.

And yet what looked aggressive was simply convenience,

the result of power borne of an Industrial Revolution.

From the railways to the telegraph to time itself.

I think one thing that we can take form all of this

is that you can't look at any technological network in isolation.

So the building of telecommunications networks

like the electric telegraph

was intimately connected with the building of railway networks

and then of steamship networks.

It's not to say that it's just the railways that affected

the development of time and communication,

but it's to say that all three networks

are absolutely closely connected.

It's hard to imagine that once there

were so many different versions of time.

Nowadays, our lives are completely ruled by timetables and schedules.

The railways sped up our lives and helped make Britain the rich and

prosperous country it is today.

They truly were the making of our

nation and changed the world forever.