Station clock

Clock tower with station clock, Waterbury Union Station, Waterbury, Connecticut, USA.

A station clock is a clock at a railway station that provides a standard indication of time to both passengers and railway staff.

A railway station will often have several station clocks. They can be found in a clock tower, in the booking hall or office, on the concourse, inside a train shed, on or facing the station platforms, or elsewhere.

Design

The design of station clocks in Europe was formerly quite diverse. Today, the majority of them are derived from the Swiss railway clock designed by Hans Hilfiker, a Swiss engineer, in 1944 when he was an employee of the Swiss Federal Railways SBB CFF FFS.^[1] In 1953, Hilfiker added a red second hand to its design in the shape of a railway guard's signaling disc. The technical implementation of the railway clock, the central synchronization by a master clock, was engineered together with Mobatime, a clock manufacturer still producing the Swiss railway clock as well as the German railway clock besides many others.^[2][3]

Modern European station standard station clock designs have a white clock face that is illuminated in the dark, bar shaped black coloured marks or scales, but no numbers, at the periphery of the clock face dial, and bar-shaped hour and minute hands, also coloured black. The second hand on these standard designs is a thin bar, thickened or fitted with a disc at the peripheral end, and often coloured red. Such clock designs are easily legible from a distance.^[2]

Examples

• Older European station clocks
• 

  King’s Cross, London

• 

  Hamburg Hauptbahnhof

• 

  Gare de Lyon, Paris

• 

  Waterloo, London

• Modern European station clocks
• 

  Round face, with curved pointers.

• 

  Square face, with straight edged pointers.

• 

  Clock in a split-flap display board.

• 

  Customised design (Heidelberg Hbf)

• Modern European standard station clock designs
• 

  Switzerland Swiss railway clock, the "mother" of the modern railway clocks

• 

  Belgium

• 

  Germany

• 

  Netherlands

See also

• Electric clock
• Railway time
• Standard time

References

Notes

1. "Remarkable clocks and watches: the Swiss railway clock". swissworld.org. Berne, Switzerland: Presence Switzerland, Swiss Federal Department of Foreign Affairs FDFA. Retrieved 2014-12-11.
2. Köbi Gantenbein, ed. (2013). Die Bahnhofsuhr – Ein Mythos des Designs aus der Schweiz (in German). Zurich, Switzerland: Edition Hochparterre. Retrieved 2014-10-19.
3. "Mobatime – Swiss Time Systems: References". Sumiswald, Bern, Switzerland: MOSER-BAER SA. Retrieved 2014-10-19.

Bibliography

• Lyman, Ian P (2004). Railway Clocks. Mayfield, Ashbourne, Derbyshire, England: Mayfield Books. ISBN 0954052560.

External links

• Railway Station Clocks - Architecture of Time

Media related to Station clocks at Wikimedia Commons