The railway
Steam on rails collapses distance and forces the world onto a single clock.
- When
- —
- Duration
- 75 years
- Known to
- ± 2 years
- Era
- Industrial, Holocene
The Stockton and Darlington opens in 1825 and the Liverpool and Manchester in 1830, and within fifty years rail networks cover Europe, North America and India. Journey times fall by an order of magnitude, bulk freight becomes cheap inland, and the requirement to publish timetables forces the abolition of local solar time — Britain standardises on railway time, and the international meridian conference of 1884 extends the logic worldwide.