Standards
On 22 September 1847, the RCH recommended that Greenwich Mean Time be adopted as the standard time for all railways in the United Kingdom.
The RCH went on to set technical standards for various items, such as goods wagons, to promote standardisation across the rail network. If a wagon was described as an RCH wagon, this meant it had been built to comply with RCH standards.
The RCH set technical standards for cable connections between coaches for the remote operation of systems; they were initially used only for control of train lighting. These cables were known as RCH jumpers, and in the 1970s a system for push-pull trains was developed which used the RCH cable, eliminating the need for a separate control cable to be fitted to intermediate coaches.
The RCH produced Railway Junction Diagrams (RJDs), which show the junctions where two or more railway companies met, and the distances between these junctions and nearby stations and junctions, in order to aid the calculation of mileage-based rates. Starting in 1871 it also issued what has been described as the "most superb series of railway maps ever produced in the United Kingdom."
The RCH had some similarities to the modern Association of Train Operating Companies, and in particular, its Rail Settlement Plan division.
Read more about this topic: Railway Clearing House
Famous quotes containing the word standards:
“In this nation I see tens of millions of its citizens, a substantial part of its whole population, who at this very moment are denied the greater part of what the very lowest standards of today call the necessities of life. I see one third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished. The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much, it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.”
—Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945)
“Measured by any standard known to science—by horse-power, calories, volts, mass in any shape,—the tension and vibration and volume and so-called progression of society were full a thousand times greater in 1900 than in 1800;Mthe force had doubled ten times over, and the speed, when measured by electrical standards as in telegraphy, approached infinity, and had annihilated both space and time. No law of material movement applied to it.”
—Henry Brooks Adams (1838–1918)
“A generation which has passed through the shop has absorbed standards and ambitions which are not of those of spaciousness, and cannot get away from them. Everything with them is done as though for sale, and they naturally have in view the greatest possible benefit, profit and that end of the stuff that will make the best show.”
—Alexander Herzen (1812–1870)