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Nineteenth-century railway companies faced a peculiar problem before national time standards existed: each town kept its own local time based on solar observation, meaning noon in one city might differ by several minutes from noon in a city just a short distance east or west. This made constructing a single, coherent timetable across a rail network extremely difficult, since a train's arrival and departure times had to be understood consistently by staff and passengers along the entire route. Railway companies were among the first institutions to adopt a standardised time across all their stations, often called 'railway time,' well before governments formally established national time zones. Passengers initially found this confusing, as station clocks might disagree with the town hall clock by several minutes. Over subsequent decades, national governments gradually adopted standard time zones partly in response to the operational needs that railways had already demonstrated.