Railroad Standard Time

Railroad standard time made coordinated schedules possible, and every carrier cutoff, delivery window, and service level today depends on shared clocks. Before 1883, towns kept their own local time based on the sun, so railroads juggled dozens of times and timetables were confusing and risky. On the Day of Two Noons, clocks were reset so that many cities heard noon twice. Congress made standard time federal law in the Standard Time Act of 1918. Operators still feel time zones when a West Coast warehouse cutoff and an East Coast customer's delivery promise are set in different zones.

• Cutoff TimeLast order time for same-day shipping
• Service Level AgreementSLAContracted performance targets for a provider
• Time in TransitBusiness days from first scan to delivery

• First Transcontinental Railroad1869 · Rails from east and west meet at Promontory Summit
• Canadian Pacific Railway Completion1885 · The last spike completes Canada's line to the Pacific
• Penn Central Bankruptcy1970 · The largest US railroad files for bankruptcy

1. Whose Time Is It Anyway? A Brief History of Standardized Time Zones in the United States blogs.loc.gov
2. Time Zones in the U.S. britannica.com
3. History of time in the United States en.wikipedia.org