Railway Time was the name given to the standardised time arrangement first applied by the Great Western Railway in England in November 1840. This was the first recorded occasion when a number of different local times were synchronised and a single standard time applied. Railway time was progressively taken up by all of the other railway companies in Great Britain over the following two to three years. The times schedules by which trains were organised and the times train stations clocks displayed was brought in line with the local time for London or “London Time”. This was also the time set at Greenwich by the Royal Observatory, which was already widely known as Greenwich Mean Time (GMT).

   Before the coming of the railways there was no universal time standard in Great Britain.   This was of little importance to those journeying on foot, and merely an inconvenience to other travellers due to the low speeds imposed by horse traction.   Stagecoaches ran to departure and arrival schedules introduced at the inception of the Royal Mail routes in 1784 and they were kept to as closely as the vagaries of the weather and roads permitted.   After the mid-1830’s the expansion of Britain’s railway network increasingly required trains to keep to set schedules, due in part to the need to make connections at the proliferating number of railway junctions.  Trains were running at ever increasing speeds and the requirement of locomotive drivers to keep to the new timetables meant that the lack of a national standard time became an annoyance to both railway companies and their patrons.

The railway companies sometimes faced concerted resistance from groups of local people, especially the Church of England,  in a number of places where trains stopped, who refused to agree to adjust their public clocks to bring them into line with London Time. As a consequence two different times could be displayed in the town and in use with the station clocks and published in train timetables differing by several minutes from that on railway company clocks. Despite this early reluctance, ‘railway time’ rapidly became adopted as the default time across the whole of Great Britain although it took until 1880 for the Government to legislate on the establishment of a single standard time and a single time zone for the country and until 1916 before the new standard railway time was taken into use everywhere on Great Britain’s railways.