America 250: How our time zones came to be

In 1883, railroad leaders and others gathered in Chicago, the railroad capital of the U.S., to fix a problem: There were no standardized time schedule to run trains.

It had been 14 years since the east and west had been united by rail, with the laying of the famous golden spike in Utah. But even with thousands of miles of track, and passengers and freight traveling on them every day, trains came and went on their own time.

There was no standardized time system to coordinate rail schedules.