Station clock

Clock tower with station clock, Waterbury Union Station, Waterbury, Connecticut, USA.

A station clock is a clock at a railway station that provides a standard indication of time to both passengers and railway staff.

A railway station will often have several station clocks. They can be found in a clock tower, in the booking hall or office, on the concourse, inside a train shed, on or facing the station platforms, or elsewhere.

Design [edit]

The design of station clocks in Europe was formerly quite diverse. Today, the majority of them resemble the Swiss railway clock designed by Hans Hilfiker, a Swiss engineer, together with Mobatime, a clock manufacturer, in 1944.

Modern European station standard station clock designs have a white clock face that is illuminated in the dark, bar shaped black coloured marks or scales, but no numbers, at the periphery of the clock face dial, and bar-shaped hour and minute hands, also coloured black. The second hand on these standard designs is a thin bar, thickened or fitted with a disc at the peripheral end, and often coloured red. Such clock designs are easily legible from a distance.