House to vote on measure making daylight saving time permanent

[LeftInTX]

18. Been there. Done that. Try catching a plane on "solar time". The US had 300 time zones at one time.

The use of local solar time became increasingly awkward as railways and telecommunications improved.[2] American railroads maintained many different time zones during the late 19th century. Each train station set its own clock making it difficult to coordinate train schedules and confusing passengers. Time calculation became a serious problem for people traveling by train (sometimes hundreds of miles in a day), according to the Library of Congress. Train drivers had to recalculate their own clocks in order to know departure time. Every city in the United States used a different time standard so there were more than 300 local sun times to choose from. Time zones were therefore a compromise, relaxing the complex geographic dependence while still allowing local time to be approximate with mean solar time. Railroad managers tried to address the problem by establishing 100 railroad time zones, but this was only a partial solution to the problem.[2]