RAILWAY TIME

TRURO | 1859

Truro station, courtesy of Cornwall Museum and Art Gallery

The coming of the railway saw towns across Cornwall change their clocks.

Before the arrival of the railways, local time was determined by use of a sundial and shown on the few public clocks that then existed. Truro time was twenty minutes behind London, Penzance 22½ minutes, Plymouth 17 minutes.

Back then, few people travelled outside their local area and the journeys of those that did took so long that these time differences didn’t matter very much, for example a fast stagecoach from Truro to Plymouth took 7½ hours in 1857, two years before the railway opened.

Railway journey times were much quicker than anything that existed before from day one so standardising time was essential.

The Great Western Railway, then running London to Bristol, introduced Greenwich Mean Time as its standard in 1840 and all stations and trains observed this.

The West Cornwall Railway linked Penzance with first Redruth and then Truro and opened to Redruth in 1852. Since it was then isolated from other railways, it observed local time.

The arrival of the Cornwall Railway and the opening of the Plymouth – Truro line on 2 May 1859 changed everything.

The fastest Truro – Plymouth train took just 2hrs 10 mins. An all stations train took 2hrs 55 mins.

The Cornwall Railway announced that they would operate London time from opening and although there wasn’t yet a physical link between the two railways in Truro, the West Cornwall immediately adopted London time too.

Because the railways had forced this change, the name “Railway time” was also used for London, Standard or Greenwich Mean Time.

The Royal Cornwall Gazette records that a week after the railway’s opening, Truro Town Council – Truro didn’t become a city until 1877 - resolved to alter the clock on the Town Hall (today’s City Hall) to show Railway time and to approach St Mary’s Church about their clock doing likewise too.

A report in the Cornish Telegraph from the end of July 1859 talks of how the coming of the railway had forced the Cornish people to adopt Railway time and that clocks in Hayle, Camborne, Bodmin and Lostwithiel had already been changed to do so.

It wasn’t until 1880 that Greenwich Mean Time was legally adopted across Britain with the Statutes (Definition of Time) Act of that year.

As part of the launch of this Fantastic Facts project, BBC Spotlight conducted an interview with Cllr Bert Biscoe about 'Railway Time' in the very fitting setting of Truro's clock tower.

This inspired a poem from Bert, which we are pleased to share (with his permission) here.