Railroad managers wanted to schedule their trains safely over single-track lines—the kind that predominated across the West and much of the rest of the United States —but safe operation was impossible except by imposing a precise system of time discipline. The relaxed "about time" reckoning that met the needs of stagecoach and steamboat travel was no longer acceptable in any community served by a railroad. All along the West's rapidly expanding network of rail lines, time discipline meant educating employees to follow timetables and train orders to the exact minute. Failure to observe accurate time might well result in a bloody head-on collision between two speeding trains inadvertently attempting to defy physics by occupying the same section of track at the same time. That was the kind of headline-grabbing misfortune every railroad engineer feared most. A growing number of long-distance travelers grew concerned about accurate timekeeping, too, because the numerous local time standards caused confusion that resulted in impossibly tight connections and missed trains.

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These were some of the reasons railroad managers, acting without support from governments at any level, resolved the confusion by introducing railroad time zones on November 18, 1883 —the so-called day of "two noons." Taking his cue from the railroad managers, Governor Thomas Crittenden encouraged Missourians to set their clocks and watches to the new Central Time. However, across the nation there were pockets of resistance. To the critics, the unilateral action by railroad managers was highhanded and thus all too typical of railroad power to shape and dominate all phases of human existence. The diehards kept their clocks and watches set on local time, but they were fighting a losing battle and they knew it. Symbolically, the railroad companies of the United States and Canada had collectively taken upon themselves a form of power that for millennia had belonged solely to God, or so their critics complained. What was the brave new world defined by railroad power coming to? The railroads new role as the self-appointed guardians of time epitomized as nothing else their seemingly limitless power to transform the Wild West through the practical application of science and engineering.

Imposition of standard time was only the most successful and far-reaching triumph of railroads over local and pre-modern ways governed by the rhythms of nature such as seasonal changes, extremes of weather, and even the contrast between the hours of daylight and darkness. Railroad regularity invariably triumphed over nature's cycles, seasonal variations, and the weather eccentricities that heightened the unpredictability of travel by stagecoach or steamboat and made every long-distance journey across the West an adventure.

Bridges for all Seasons

One particularly dramatic photograph dating from the early 1880s shows steam locomotives lined up like circus elephants atop the Northern Pacific's newly constructed bridge over the Missouri River at Bismarck, Dakota Territory. The image illustrates a common method railroads used at the time to field-test the strength and safety of bridges before the first passenger and freight trains chugged across them. Less obvious was that the bridge at Bismarck towered above the water corridor that Lewis and Clark followed eight decades earlier and steamboats based in St. Louis had used in more recent years for fur trade commerce and gold-camp traffic. Feats of railroad engineering triumphed literally as well as symbolically over familiar steamboat technology and the seasonal variations that could impede or halt steamboat travel on the rivers of the northern West for months at a time.

One reason that the Lewis and Clark Expedition spent the winter of 1804 at Fort Mandan, an historic site about 50 miles north of the new bridge, was that the Missouri River froze solid and impeded water travel until the spring thaw six months later. In later years, the Missouri River commerce based in St. Louis shut down each winter. On the Columbia River's water highway system west of the Rockies, winter ice likewise halted steamboat traffic between Portland and the inland port of Lewiston (in present-day Idaho), trailhead for the northern mines in the 1860s.

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