Essentially, folks were winging it in North America. The Canadians would go on to kickstart the first railroad watch standards. Ahead is a pared-down timeline that shows how this emergence evolved into an international affair. His proposal comes five years before GMT was established as the international global time standard. Ferguson Dial patented later. This pocket watch resembles modern standard railroad watches and was incredibly innovative. Webb C. Ball was charged with standardizing North American railway timekeeping.
This is due to a tragic railway incident in the American Midwest These standards remained unaltered for nearly 40 years. Lever set, rather than watches set on the crown, remained chosen because their crowns would not catch by mistake.
Railroad companies have whole fleets of quality inspectors checking timepieces for standardized features at every railway stop. Naturally, this situation also led to a lot of confusion. In the United States, when a new Standard Time System was implemented in , instituting the time zones in use today, it replaced 49 different operating times. Later, Greenwich in England was designated the Prime Meridian to which all others referred. Accurate watches and clocks were critical to making the railroads function efficiently and safely.
A single track was often shared by trains going in either direction with the ability to pass each other only at stations and designated sidings. So, if the timing was off, it could lead to deadly accidents like the well-publicized one in Ohio in — though other such incidents were reported around the world.
After the Ohio collision, a Cleveland jeweler named Webster C. He was the founder of the Ball Watch Company that continues to make watches today that reference its railroad history.
Ball developed a system for ensuring the railroad clocks and watches carried by railroad employees were consistent and precise. Other railways around the country and the world instituted similar systems.
The need for precision and reliability led to highly precise watches from American companies like Ball, Hamilton, Waltham, Elgin, and others. Standards for these watches evolved over time, right into the age of wristwatches, and these led to some beautiful, interesting, and mechanically impressive watches. A railroad grade pocket watch is simply a watch that was approved by a particular railroad organization for use by conductors on their rail. And, contrary to common belief, there were many regulations in place before Webb C.
One rail may have had a list of accepted makes and models of timepieces while another may have only listed necessary features or timekeeping performance thresholds. This makes evaluating older watches as railroad grade a very difficult task, i. As the rail industry grew in the United States, the number of active trains grew with it. In order to use the track efficiently, companies needed to create time schedules identifying when each section of the track was safe to use.
Talk about a lot relying on a single piece of equipment! Timepieces were clearly an important aspect of ensuring safety for all. At this time both the watch companies and the railroads were hitting their stride in terms of volume and quality. An important part of standard watch regulations included service intervals and testing, but there is also a list of features that almost all railroad watches shared.
Most watches are put in time-setting mode by pulling the crown winding knob away from the watch, then pushing the crown back towards the watch to return to winding mode. This is referred to as "pendant-set. A lever-set mechanism requires the user to remove the bezel of the watch and engage a lever to place the watch in setting mode.
This tedious process of removing the bezel of the watch had a very important purpose; it ensured that the time on the watch was never accidentally changed by catching the winding knob on a pocket or any number of other unintentional situations. Another iconic feature of railroad watches is their big, bold, black, Arabic numerals on highly contrasting white enamel dials with large bold hands.
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