The action of the railroad companies having been assured, the subsequent action on the part of city governments became possible as it could not have been otherwise. Of the labor and means employed to secure this action on the part of the railways and the cities it is unnecessary here to speak. They proved sufficient to accomplish very fully the end desired. More than eighty per cent of all the cities of over ten thousand inhabitants in the United States have adopted standard time.
The adoption of the new standard required a simultaneous change to be made in the railway-clocks and the watches of employés upon nearly every railroad in the United States and Canada, the change varying from one minute and three seconds on the Pennsylvania Railroad to forty-five minutes on the Intercolonial Railway of Canada. The exceptions were two roads in the vicinity of New Orleans, and a few lines in the vicinity of Denver. The change was also slight for some of the St. Louis roads. The Intercolonial Railway adopted the time of the seventy-fifth meridian as a matter of convenience, instead of that of the sixtieth meridian, to which its location would have properly assigned it. So perfect were the preparations that not a single accident at any point is recorded as having been caused by the change. On the day when the new standards took effect, the clocks of about twenty thousand railway-stations and the watches of three hundred thousand railway employés were reset. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of city and town clocks were altered to conform. How many individuals reset their watches it is impossible to compute, but they could certainly be reckoned by millions. Probably no such singular incident has ever before happened, or is likely to occur again.
At the present time, from the Atlantic Ocean at the eastern extremity of New Brunswick, to the Pacific coast at Oregon, the minute-hands of the railway clocks and watches indicate the same minute of time at all hours, and fully fifty million people regulate their business affairs by standard time.
While a few and for the most part unimportant communities, and some railway companies, did not make the change immediately, so large a majority adopted the system on November 18, 1883, that that date may be fairly taken as the one upon which the reform took effect. Several New England railroads, the Central Vermont Railroad being the most important, commenced to run their trains by "Eastern" standard time on October 7, 1883. The Central and Southern Pacific Railroads west of Ogden and Deming, and their branch lines, are the only railroads in the United States or Canada which do not now use standard time, if we except two purely local roads in Pennsylvania, aggregating less than twenty miles in length. The last to adopt the system were the Union Pacific Railway and the city of Omaha, on May 1, 1884.
