To the editors:
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Your review cited the situation whereby a farmer might milk cows all through the year at the same solar time, but have to get his milk to a train–as long as milk traveled by train–that operates on daylight saving time during the summer months. This situation did not arise because the railroads only switched to daylight saving time schedules for suburban trains during the summer months. The intercity passenger trains and freight trains operated on standard (non-daylight saving) time throughout the year. If you wanted to catch the scheduled 8:40 AM train for Indianapolis, you arrived at the depot an hour later if your watch was on daylight saving time.
I grew up in the twenties in a railroad household and lived on dinner-table railroad gossip. Both my father and grandfather were railroad telegraphers and they sometimes used the clicking of a knife-fork against the dinner plate to exchange private comments, a practice which was not appreciated by my mother.
