The Rail Safety and Standards Board (RSSB) has published a new standard regarding requirements and guidance for the formatting of date and time across the British rail network.

Aiming to provide a more precise interpretation of time, the Standard introduced by RSSB will promote the use of Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), as well as a more consistent formatting of date, time and UTC time offset values to bring British systems in line with international standards.

The new standard will promote the use of Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), as well as a more consistent formatting of date, time and UTC time offset values

With the introduction of the new standard, RSSB hopes to provide the industry with more reliable information for the recovery, combination and analysis of data, specify new systems and ensure a more reliable cybersecurity network.

Currently, time systems within the rail sector rely on a selection of several different sources, including radio, networked and satellite-based clocks, with UTC lagging behind atomic clock & GPS time by up to 37 and 18 seconds, respectively.

The RSSB claims that such differences in timing can lead to issues related to internal timestamp comparisons, providing an inaccurate view of collated data across the network.

Time across the British rail network was first standardised by Great Western Railway in 1840, who made the decision to synchronise clocks across its network following a period in which time differed by up to 25 minutes from the time in London.

Tom Lee, RSSB’s Director of Standards, said:

RSSB's closest predecessor, the Railway Clearing House, led the standardisation of time across the country, publishing its first standard, about time, on the 22nd of September 1847.

A 21st century digital railway is built on consistent and accurate time data, and our new standard supports this, helping to synchronise systems, improving real-time and post-event analysis, and enabling more effective incident investigations.

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