SOME FAST TRAINS. Grand Central Terminal in New York has some old synchronization equipment and some even older clocks. Live from the Third Rail finds coverage of an upgrade to the clocks that includes a bit of history of "railroad time" and the evolution of standard time. The article also hints at some extremely fast running on the New York Central.

"A train could leave Syracuse at 12 o'clock and come into Utica, and it would still be 12 o'clock," said Pierce Haviland, a Metro-North employee who is also a railroad historian. "That wasn't working."

That would be some stunt. Utica is east of Syracuse, meaning local noon in Utica ought to precede local noon in Syracuse. Going west, the train would have to make the Utica-Syracuse run in four or five minutes. (To think that there is still controversy about No. 999 hitting 112 mph on a test train, sometime after the adoption of standard time ... apparently such speeds were routinely exceeded by an order of magnitude before the adoption of standard time.)