We can thank the railroad industry for standardising our time zones. Until the 19th century, towns and villages synchronised their clocks to the local solar noon. This created thousands of local times that all varied and made scheduling transportation a major headache. Train schedules in different cities had to list dozens of arrival and departure times for each train to account for all the mini-time zones. On November 18, 1883, railroad companies in the United States and Canada began using a system very similar to the standardised time zones we still use today. In the UK, the railroad companies began using a standard London-based time in 1840.