About this blog
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.
Search
Categories
Recent Articles
Have you missed one?...
Archives
- May 2012 (2)
- April 2012 (9)
- March 2012 (9)
- February 2012 (23)
- January 2012 (12)
- December 2011 (19)
- November 2011 (18)
- October 2011 (14)
- September 2011 (24)
- August 2011 (32)
- July 2011 (14)
- June 2011 (13)
- more...
Friends of A.R.T
Syndicate this blog
- RSS 0.92 (Userland):
Posts, Comments - RSS 1.0 (RDF):
Posts, Comments - RSS 2.0 (Userland):
Posts, Comments - Atom 0.3:
Posts, Comments
Other Links
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!
|
Comments:
No Comments for this post yet...
Comments are closed for this post.
