Martainville train station clock

This clock, recovered in 1985 during the demolition of the old Martainville station, on the initiative of Marc Boulanger, deputy director of the Chu and a local history enthusiast, bears witness to the need for accuracy to which trains are subjected to ensure the smooth running of the railway system.

But for more than fifty years, passengers had to juggle with three different types of time, sometimes four, to avoid missing their train.

The Legrand plan of 1833 organised the development of the railways in France. It provided for the construction of star lines from Paris, and links to Orleans were opened in 1840, Rouen in 1843 and Lille in 1846. The construction of the 40,000 km network continued until 1914.

In order to ensure the regularity of the entire railway system, the punctuality of the trains was essential. In dense areas, the late train blocks the following ones, which are themselves late. On a single track, the delay at the siding prevents the oncoming train from being on time. Non-regularity can thus spread rapidly.

This regularity must take into account local times, based on the sun. Thus, when it is 12:00 in Brest, it is 12:27 in Paris, 12:48 in Strasbourg and 12:39 in Marseille.

The railways therefore adopted a single time for the entire network, that of Paris, and in order not to disadvantage travellers used to the approximate times of the stagecoaches, the trains were systematically late by five minutes, based on the so-called "Rouen time".

For a traveller, keeping to the timetable is a complex matter: if he leaves his village to go to Paris by train in Rouen, he is confronted with the approximate timetable of the stagecoach based on the time in use in his village, and then in the Saint Sever station in Rouen with two other times: that of the town of departure (Rouen) and that of Paris (adopted by the railways), the train arriving five minutes late (thus respecting the so-called "Rouen time").

In the interests of accuracy, clocks in stations and town halls were increasingly fitted with two minute hands: one indicating local time, the other Paris time.

It was not until 1891 that the time was standardised, set at the average time in Paris for the whole of the country and Algeria.

A final shift took place in 1911, of 9 minutes and 21 seconds throughout the country, with the adoption of Greenwich Mean Time as the reference.