I can easily imagine a world where the railways switched from local solar time to universal time, without developing timezones. Afterall, the problem with local solar time is that it changes between cities, and that’s true with timezones as well, it’s just less frequent (and with even hour or half-hour multiples). If anything, universal time would be easier. Universal time doesn’t work for non-railroads very well though, so I can totally imagine local solar time sticking around without having to seriously change anything about the world.
The main objection in the link seems to be a pre-supposition that solar time information about different places would be less available than time zone conversion now. That seems probably false. Also, sleep schedules depending on culture and not necessarily lining up with solar time is not any less of an issue now.
I can easily imagine a world where the railways switched from local solar time to universal time, without developing timezones. Afterall, the problem with local solar time is that it changes between cities, and that’s true with timezones as well, it’s just less frequent (and with even hour or half-hour multiples). If anything, universal time would be easier. Universal time doesn’t work for non-railroads very well though, so I can totally imagine local solar time sticking around without having to seriously change anything about the world.
The main objection in the link seems to be a pre-supposition that solar time information about different places would be less available than time zone conversion now. That seems probably false. Also, sleep schedules depending on culture and not necessarily lining up with solar time is not any less of an issue now.