Before the widespread adoption of standardised time zones in the late 19th century, most towns and cities across the world kept their own local time, typically calibrated according to the precise moment the sun reached its highest point overhead, a practice known as solar noon. This system functioned reasonably well when travel between distant locations was slow and communication similarly limited, since the minor time discrepancies between neighbouring towns rarely posed any significant practical problem. The rapid expansion of railway networks throughout the 19th century, however, exposed serious and increasingly urgent problems with this traditional, decentralised approach to timekeeping. Railway companies operating across large distances found it extraordinarily difficult to construct coherent, workable schedules when each town along a given route kept a slightly different local time, sometimes differing by mere minutes but creating chaos regardless. In response, railway companies began independently establishing their own standardised operating times, though this created a confusing patchwork of competing, inconsistent time systems used simultaneously across different regions. The eventual solution came through international cooperation: an 1884 conference established a global system of standardised time zones, each one anchored to a specific reference meridian and offset from a universal reference point by a whole number of hours. Although this system required certain communities to gradually abandon their traditional local solar time in favour of a more practical standardised alternative, it ultimately provided the crucial coordination framework necessary to support increasingly complex railway networks and, eventually, international communication and commerce on a truly global scale.