What Happens to Overnight Trains when the Clocks Change?

[Michael Hodgson]

10 hours ago, njee20 said:

It’s at 2am. 

Yes and no.

 

2am doesn't exist when you're winding the clocks forward because it's immediately 3am!

 

You put the clocks back at what would be 2am.  If you're winding the clocks back 1:59 is followed by 1am and then you get a second 1:30 am etc for a second time and only after you have done that do you hit 2am - but you should have wound the clock back an hour before that!

 

[Wickham Green too]

... and at that time in the morning you're not thinking straight so every time you open a bleary eyelid and spot that it's 01.59 you wind back to 01.00 ............. an' before you know it it's daylight an' you haven't got a bl00dy clue what the time really is !

[Jeremy Cumberland]

8 hours ago, PerthBox said:

It’s all explained in the WON every year - 

 

 

I might be being a bit dim, but the second sentence under "Train Services" doesn't make sense.

 

The first sentence is fine. Trains due to start before 02:00 start on time and then run early when the clocks shift back an hour. The third sentence is also fine. Trains due to start at 02:00 and after run at their ordinary time (using Greenwich mean time). Where, then, does this leave trains starting between 02:00 and 03:00? Why on earth should they start an hour early, and which trains does this apply to, since the first and third sentences appear to cover all trains. Has this sentence been mistakenly included from when the clocks move forward in the spring (where its presence, or something like it, would be essential).

 

It still doesn't answer one of the questions asked. What about entries in signal box registers? It might be obvious if you have consecutive entries of 01:57 and 01:04, for example, but not if there's only one entry/set of entries between 1 and 2.

[APOLLO]

All is explained here !!

 

 

Brit15

[njee20]

58 minutes ago, Michael Hodgson said:

Yes and no.

 

2am doesn't exist when you're winding the clocks forward because it's immediately 3am!

 

You put the clocks back at what would be 2am.  If you're winding the clocks back 1:59 is followed by 1am and then you get a second 1:30 am etc for a second time and only after you have done that do you hit 2am - but you should have wound the clock back an hour before that!

 

That's just epic pedantry. In March the clocks go 01.59.59 -> 03.00.00. In October they go 01.59.59 -> 01.00.00. So yes, ok if you prefer the clocks change at the millisecond after 01.59.59.999; I'll call that 2am...

[kevinlms]

10 hours ago, PerthBox said:

It’s all explained in the WON every year - 

 

 

It makes sense to have a system in place, as it's been occuring for decades now. No need to reinvent the wheel.

[kevinlms]

11 hours ago, Wickham Green too said:

Of course these things have to be tackled every night - or day - of the year where trains cross into different time zones on the worlds larger 'islands'.

It's worse than that in Australia, as while DS now occurs on the same dates for changes (it didn't used to - sometimes it varied by a week or two!), not all states have Daylight Saving.

Queensland, Western Australia & Northern Territory don't have it. The first 2 have had state referendums on the matter, so unlikely to change for years.

 

So now (DS is in use now) when it's Midnight in NSW, Vic, ACT & Tasmania, it's 11.00 PM in Queensland, 11.30 PM in SA, 10.30 PM in NT and 9.00 PM in WA.

 

Crossing an actual border, makes little difference as the vast majority of DS crossings are away from major centres (some exceptions NSW to Queensland, but they aren't huge). Broken Hill for geographic reasons, considers itself as part of SA.

 

Nowhere is as bad as say Indiana in the USA, where some counties are in different time zones. Because they are effectively part of Chicago and makes sense for them to share a time zone.

[big jim]

11 hours ago, Bernard Lamb said:

Never mind the trains. What about the poor drivers and other staff who had to put in an extra hour on their shift last night. On the very odd time that it happened to me at work I did get paid extra for it. The same procedure the other way round, where you went home an hour early.

Bernard

 

I got screwed over for an hours work on Saturday night!

 

my working day was 18:30 to 04:30 and I didn’t know the clocks were changing, I was booked relief at 03:00 BST and I was a bit puzzled when my phone (and Apple watch) suddenly showed 1am again! 
 

My relief actually turned up at 01:30 GMT anyway (02:30 BST) so I wasn’t really late but I never got paid for the extra hour! 

Edited October 30, 2023 by big jim

[adb968008]

19 minutes ago, big jim said:

 

I got screwed over for an hours work on Saturday night!

 

my working day was 18:30 to 04:30 and I didn’t know the clocks were changing, I was booked relief at 03:00 BST and I was a bit puzzled when my phone (and Apple watch) suddenly showed 1am again! 
 

My relief actually turned up at 01:30 GMT anyway (02:30 BST) so I wasn’t really late but I never got paid for the extra hour! 

I was wondering how that worked…

[Michael Hodgson]

10 hours ago, kevinlms said:

It makes sense to have a system in place, as it's been occuring for decades now. No need to reinvent the wheel.

The trouble with that notice is that it doesn't tell you to put the clocks back only once.  If at 2am you put the clocks back as instructed, an hour later it will be 2am again.  So as a good barrack-room lawyer you should put the clocks back another hour, and then another hour later .....

 

Good job they'not working to rule !

Edited October 30, 2023 by Michael Hodgson

[Nick C]

20 hours ago, bimble said:

Though there are talks about the EU dropping the clock changes because the further south you live the less sense it makes.

Which is why doing many things on a pan-continental basis doesn't make sense - the same with car lighting requirements that are essential in the darker northern countries but not the brighter southern ones...

 

20 hours ago, Wickham Green too said:

Personally, I don't think it makes a lot of sense as it is - suddenly giving us an extra hour of dark in the evenings ....................... ☹️

But an extra hour of light in the morning! It was much easier to get up for work this morning...

[Pete the Elaner]

21 hours ago, Wickham Green too said:

Personally, I don't think it makes a lot of sense as it is - suddenly giving us an extra hour of dark in the evenings ....................... ☹️

 

It makes plenty of sense to change time zones.

We don't "get given an hour of darkness in the evenings" or "lose an hour of light". We trade light (& temperature), evening for morning.
GMT is the UK's native time, so it makes less sense to use BST at all but. as is often the case, a study of history will explain it:

 

2-3 centuries ago, everywhere judged time locally, defining noon as when the sun was at its highest point.

This was fine until transport became fast enough to make it a problem. You could catch a train from London to Bristol, which was 10 minutes behind, so it was decided to use a standard. GMT was therefore introduced.

A few years later, countries with lots of daylight variation had sunrise at 4am in the summer before most people had got up, so it was of little use to most but sunset at 8pm, when most people were still active. Temperature follows this by a few hours (the coldest time of day is when the sun rises) which is why our social time is in the evening. In order to make it easier for everyone, summer time was introduced in 1916 to make more use of the extra hours of daylight without forcing people to change their schedules. This kept buses, trains, work & school all together without making it necessary to publish any changes.

Most countries within the tropics do not use daylight saving because their daylight varies so little.

 

& the important bit:

In the 1968, the UK decided to trial abandoning GMT & keep BST all year round. This meant that in the winter, sunrise was as late as 9.30am, with sunset at 4.30pm.

Road accidents were allegedly reduced in this time, but drink driving was made an offence in 1967, which would also have had a big effect on road safety, so it is impossible to determine which was the more significant factor.

In 1971, it was decided that summer time in the winter was awful if you regularly do things fairly early in the morning, so UTC (GMT with a minor correction because somebody declared it inaccurate) was adopted for winter time in Britain.

Nothing significant with the way we work, learn or use transport has changed with society since the early 70s.

 

Abandoning winter time has been tried but viewed as a failed experiment. In other words, summer time in winter was considered horrible.

We could either learn from the past or repeat the same mistakes. Repeating the same mistakes seems very silly though.

[Nick C]

One of the daftest reasons I've heard for changing to UTC+1 in the winter was "Well, it works in Norway" - err, of course it does, Norway's a timezone east of here!

[Wickham Green too]

1 hour ago, Pete the Elaner said:

... summer time in the winter was awful if you regularly do things fairly early in the morning, ...

Now, I've certainly no idea what proportion of the population do anything early in the morning other than going to work - when it matters for few whether it's light or dark ......... I'm sure far more people do things after work ( defining 'work' for purpose of this argument as 9-5 ).

 

Yes, I DO recall our experiment with British Standard Time and thought it was great.

[Nick C]

23 minutes ago, Wickham Green too said:

Now, I've certainly no idea what proportion of the population do anything early in the morning other than going to work - when it matters for few whether it's light or dark ......... I'm sure far more people do things after work ( defining 'work' for purpose of this argument as 9-5 ).

 

Yes, I DO recall our experiment with British Standard Time and thought it was great.

It's not so much the going to work, as the waking up when it's pitch black outside - at least now we get a couple more weeks of light in the morning.

 

Plus there's the issue of kids going to school? It's much safer for them to walk if it's light, and the most common excuse used by people driving their kids to school in big SUVs is that it's too dangerous for them to walk - so making it more dangerous isn't going to help...

[Wickham Green too]

I've got an alarm clock !

 

 

[Pete the Elaner]

2 hours ago, Nick C said:

It's not so much the going to work, as the waking up when it's pitch black outside - at least now we get a couple more weeks of light in the morning.

 

 

Not just light. The daily thermal cycle lags behind daylight & it is usually coldest at dawn. It takes a while for the sunlight to warm the place up again.

When it gets frosty, UTC means the frost thaws an hour 'earlier' which is an advantage when going anywhere.

[Pete the Elaner]

2 hours ago, Wickham Green too said:

Now, I've certainly no idea what proportion of the population do anything early in the morning other than going to work - when it matters for few whether it's light or dark ......... I'm sure far more people do things after work ( defining 'work' for purpose of this argument as 9-5 ).

 

Yes, I DO recall our experiment with British Standard Time and thought it was great.

 

You are free to get up an hour earlier.

Quite a lot of people do things like shopping, running, cycling at 9am. That is not excessively early but would be dark in December if we used BST.

 

GMT is not a solution to a problem. It is the UK's native time & existed long before BST. Working hours were based on GMT but this was considered wasteful in the summer as I explained earlier. BST is the bodge, not GMT.

[wombatofludham]

I'm old enough to remember going to school during the British Standard Time experiment and it wasn't an issue.  Thing is whether you get an hour or less of daylight in the morning for a month or two, or in the evening, you don't actually gain any extra daylight, so at some point you will be doing stuff in the dark wherever you shove your clock.  The thing is, society HAS changed.  People work non-standard patterns in many more jobs than the old heavy industry, three shift pattern that was common when the last experiment in abandoning so-called daylight saving time happened.  Shop workers, hospitality workers, delivery workers and others have been added to those who work 24 hour shift patterns. Of course, those working in the night-time transport sector have grown exponentially with the growth of overnight air cargo and courier/food trunk hauling as well.  

There is also evidence that the so called "daylight saving" time changes actually lead to a spike in road accidents as people adjust to darker home conditions for those who still work so called "normal" office hours.

I don't have an axe to grind whether we stay on GMT all year or BST or split the difference, it doesn't increase the amount of daylight and somebody won't like it for various reasons.  But, we should stick to one or the other and stop fannying around with the clocks pretending we're gaining daylight.  We will continue to lose about 2-3 minutes daylight every day until mid-December when we start to gain a couple of minutes a day, whatever we do with the clocks so let's torri y cachu, and just stick with one time all year round and just suck it up.

[Michael Hodgson]

Whilst I can see the advantage of standardising the time across a wide area and substituting GMT or "railway time" for each town's local time to avoid confusion, I really can't see the point of mucking about with the clocks twice a year.  Noon is noon when the sun is at its peak.  If you want to work/go to school earlier/later in the day to take advantage of optimum daylight or whatever, just change your start and finish times to whatever is most convenient and set you alarm clock accordingly.

[big jim]

6 hours ago, Wickham Green too said:

I've got an alarm clock !

 

 

 

 

I don’t know why but your comment really made me smile, imagined it like it was some sort of brag!

 

 

[The Stationmaster]

Managing the change is the simplest thing in the world - don't forget that the railway has been doing so for decades.  The BR paybill system incorporated an automatic to wnsure that the correct turn length was paid on overnight turns of duty.  The timetable didn'y need to be changed - just a general items in the train notices that trains would be running either 1 hour later or 1 hour esrlier after the change took place dut ring teh night and sleeping car and other overnight trains had an 'advice to passenger iitem General Instructions Circular as a reminder for any staff involved.

 

eaid easy.  What was far worse was with international trains when clock change dates varied between countries - usually by one week but occasionally by two weeks.  This meant on Eurostar that we had to run a different timetable for those periods.  Fortunately the EU made a very sensible decision that clock change dates would be synchronised across the entire EU - which saved a load of work.

[bécasse]

In the days when London Victoria-Gatwick trains ran hourly all night, the relevant STN clearly stated that trains that had already started their journey before 03.00 B.S.T. would run in B.S.T. timings throughout, and that there would be an additional departure at (say) 02.25 G.M.T. and that that and any later trains would run in G.M.T. timings. So, in effect, both London Victoria and Gatwick saw two "02.25" departures an hour apart during the early hours.

 

Presumably something similar happens today.

[roythebus1]

From what I remember in my years in the transport industry, it's always been a case that that things that started before 01.59GMT ran at GMT time throughout. At the other end of the year, trains that started on BST ran at BST throughout.

 

Staff never lost and hour's pay or gained an hour's pay as they were still only doing 8 hours or whatever the rostered duty was. I believe that is still the case today.

 

According to a radio quiz the other day, Daylight Saving wasn't devised to help war workers in 1916, it was devised by some very influential businessmen who played gold in the early morning and realised that if they put the clocks back/forward they'd be able to get an extra hour of daylight for golf before work.

[Jeremy Cumberland]

9 hours ago, roythebus1 said:

Staff never lost and hour's pay or gained an hour's pay as they were still only doing 8 hours or whatever the rostered duty was. I believe that is still the case today.

It depends what the duty is. Train crew might still be only working their usual hours, but signallers won't, not unless changeover times are different in summer and winter, which I am pretty sure they are not.

 

I've never done shift work on the railways, but I have in a factory, and we got paid for the hours worked. An hour more (at night rate, of course) in the autumn, and an hour less in the spring, for those who happened to be on that shift.