Czas kolejowy

The inventions of the electromagnetic telegraph and the railroads significantly accelerated communication in time and space. It greatly influenced the way time was expressed and forced a change of centuries-old patterns and habits. It became necessary to gradually move away from local times (the average solar times of individual places) to the uniform time in the scale of entire countries, and then to the zone time. This process began in the 1830s on the railway and a few years later in the telegraph service, developing in parallel and in conjunction with the railroads. Initially, individual railway authorities adopted the same railway time on their networks (usually the capital time of a given country or the directorate’s headquarters). From 1884 until the first decade of the 20th century, culminating in the early 1990s, they gradually switched to zone time. Its introduction improved the work of railways, increased traffic safety, and made it easier for passengers to find their way around train timetables. Almost in parallel, since the mid-1860s, the process of switching from a twelve-hour count to a 24-hour count of time on the railways took place. In the rich literature devoted to time in its various aspects, few studies focus on the issues of organizing the measurement and expression of time on railways, and there are virtually no studies relating to railways in the present-day Polish lands which at the time operated under three different state authorities. The work aims to collect and systematize the facts that contributed to the process of introducing the 24-hour zone time on Central European railways and to present this process in the context of the world railways.