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Standardising Time and Date on Britain’s Railways

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Our new standard sets out requirements and guidance for the use, interpretation, and formatting of time and date information across the network.

In the early 1800s, times across Great Britain could differ by up to 25 minutes from the time in London. Britain’s railways led the standardisation of time with the Great Western Railway synchronising the clocks across its network in 1840.

Currently, systems within the rail industry use different time sources. These includes satellite-based clocks, radio clocks, and networked clocks. In addition, Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) lags behind atomic clock time by 37 seconds and GPS time by 18 seconds. These differences complicate the comparison of timestamps across systems.

RSSB’s new standard is on how to interpret time data, because this data can be affected by multiple factors. It will help the industry find, combine, and analyse data and specify new systems. It will also help maintain cybersecurity.

The new standard promotes the wider use of UTC and the consistent formatting of date, time, and UTC time offset values. This is in line with international standards.

RSSB’s Director of Standards, Tom Lee, said: 

“RSSB's closest predecessor, the Railway Clearing House, led the standardisation of time across the country, publishing its first standard, about time, on the 22nd of September 1847.

“A 21st century digital railway is built on consistent and accurate time data, and our new standard supports this, helping to synchronise systems, improving real-time and post-event analysis, and enabling more effective incident investigations.”