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A.R.T is the International Air Rail Organisation's blog, with news, articles and comment on all things related to air rail links world-wide. Your comments and thoughts are welcome: for obvious reasons, they will be moderated and may be edited.
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Oct13
What's the right way to use the 24 hour clock?
How do you say 9:00 or 13:00? Oh-nine-hundred hours? Thirteen hundred hours? So do quite a few people. But should they?
Surely the logic of the system is that 9:00 is nine hours after midnight: 13:00 is thirteen hours after midnight. Why not say so? Some years ago, an announcer at Paddington station used to do just this - he'd announce the departure of "The nine hours train to Swansea". Which sounded odd, but was probably right!
Thirteen hundred hours - well, 1,300 hours after midnight is in about 2 months time!
One of the announcers at Farringdon today talks about the "oh-eight o'clock train" - which confuses the two systems! Twenty-one o'clock sounds even more wrong!
I can't end this blog without a story from when British Railways first started using the 24 hour clock. Someone came to a ticket collector at the station where I worked and asked about trains to Luton. "Well, there's a 21:40, which is twenty to ten, then there's the 22:10, which isn't twenty to anything but ten past ten, then the 22:40 ...". Ah, the customer service of yesteryear!
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