I have to acknowledge your letter of October 17, introducing to my notice the difficulty which appears to be arising in America regarding a “Standard Time,” for extensive use throughout N. America “applicable to railway traffic only.”  The subject, as including considerations of convenience in all the matters to which it applies, is one of difficulties probably insuperable.  The certainty, however, that objections may be raised to every scheme, renders me less timid in offering my own remarks; which are much at your service.

I first comment upon your expression of “Standard Time... applicable to railway traffic only.”  But do you mean this as affecting the transactions between one railway and another railway, or as affecting each railway and the local interests (temporal and others) of the towns which it touches?  The difference is so great that I should be disposed to adopt it as marking very strongly the difference to be made between the practices of railways among themselves and the practices of railways towards the public; and will base a system on that difference.

As regards the practices of railways among themselves:  if the various railways of America are joined and inosculated as they are in England, it appears to me indispensable that they have one common standard among themselves:  say Washington Observatory time.  But this is only needed for the office-transactions between the railways; it may be kept perfectly private; never communicated to the public at all.  And I should recommend this as the first step.

There will then be no difficulty in deducing, from these private Washington times, the accurate local times at those stations (whose longitude is supposed to be fairly well known, as a sailor with a sextant can determine one in a few hours) which the railway authorities may deem worthy of that honour; generally the termini of railways.  Thus we shall have a series of bases of local time, of authoritative character, through the country.

Of such bases we have two, Greenwich and Dublin:  and they are separated by a sea-voyage.  In the U.S. of America there must be a greater number, and probably not so well separated.  Still it is indispensable to adopt such a system of local centers.

No people in this world can be induced to use a reckoning which does not depend clearly upon the sun.  In all civilized countries it depends (approximately) on the sun’s meridian passage.  Even the sailor on mid-ocean refers to that phenomenon.  And the solar passage, with reasonable allowance, 20m. or 30m. one way or another, must be recognized in all time-arrangements as giving the fundamental time.  The only practical way of doing this is, to adopt for a whole region the fundamental time of a center of that region.

And to this fundamental time, the local time of the railway, as now entering into all the concerns of life, must be adapted.  A solicitor has an appointment to meet a client by railway; a physician to a consultation.  How is this to be kept if the railway uses one time and every other act of life another?