Practically speaking, though, the existence of the Bradshaw’s Railway Time Tables—and the inter-company travel it invited—raised a serious problem. One could not reliably plan a transfer when every company used its own clocks. Even setting company time was a chore of comic proportions: every morning, the Grand Junction Company sent a watch on a train from London’s Euston Station to Holyhead, in Wales, where it was passed onto the ferry to Dublin. Having set the clocks for the Company in Ireland, said watch was returned to the capital by the same route.

Changing trains was a guessing game. Wolfgang Schivelbusch, author of The Railway Journey, writes, “London time ran four minutes ahead of time in Reading, seven minutes and thirty seconds ahead of Cirencester time, fourteen minutes ahead of Bridgewater time.” In America, train stations in Buffalo and Pittsburgh carried three and six clocks respectively, with each clock face showing the official time for one of the companies that stopped there.

After an error on a timetable caused Scottish railway engineer Sandford Fleming to miss a train in Ireland in 1876, Fleming embarked on a crusade to make time across Britain conform to the clock at the Greenwich Observatory. Just four years later, England adopted universal time; America followed in 1889 with four time zones; Germany in 1893. Slowly, life in cities adapted. The small towns in path of the iron horse soon followed. Railroad time ticked its way into homes and businesses from Berlin to Buffalo.

For this considerable transformative achievement, the timetable acquired an aura of logic and reason. Gabriel Syme, the protagonist of G.K. Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday, argued that if poets cared for order, “the most poetic thing in the world would be the Underground Railway.”

“No, take your mere books of poetry and prose,” Syme continues, “let me read a time-table, with tears of pride. Take your Byron, who commemorates the defeats of man; give me Bradshaw, who commemorates his victories. Give me Bradshaw, I say!”

Like the eight-hour day, the elements of the timetable came to represent working life. Le Corbusier may have viewed the commute as the tyranny of poor urban design—life measured out not in coffee spoons but in train times—but it also inspired popular camaraderie. A simple train time, an incantation that summoned commuters day after day and year after year, was a kind of identity.

Americans who danced to Billy Murray’s 1915 hit “On the 5:15” (mp3) knew exactly what the title meant. “When you’re leaving out where the fields are green,” Murray sings, “you’ve got to go home on the 5:15.” The plot was as follows: when the song’s protagonist continues to miss the 5:15 train to his suburban home, his angry wife takes him to divorce court. Will he be locked up? No chance: “The jury, the lawyers, the judge supreme – all were commuters on the 5:15!” More than half a century later, Pete Townshend and the Who found the reference held sway with a different audience in a different country, few of whom had likely ever heard of Billy Murray. They too knew about the “5:15.”

If the timetables posted on refrigerators, tacked above log books and tucked in jacket pockets were the taskmasters of metropolitan life, they also traded in fantasy. Edith Wharton’s Ethan Frome, like countless other American men of his age, assembled his dreams of escape from the blueprint of a newspaper ad for journeys west. Railroad companies encouraged this aspiration: in addition to informing the public of train times, they were trying to sell tickets, and even, pursuant to the Railroad Acts, plots of land.