I would like to dedicate this page to my dad, Joe Sirianni, for teaching me the fine art of repairing these beautiful watches. My dad was a watchmaker for over 50 years. He was the railroad watch inspector in our area. All the workers on the railroad needed their watches cleaned and timed on a yearly basis. Dad would overhaul these watches and inspect them so they would be up to the railroad's standards. I was very fortunate to be able to work with my father for over 20 years.
The use of watches on American railroads goes back almost to the beginning. As soon as there were two trains moving in opposite directions on a single-track line, there arose a need to control their movements. Very early on, those movements were described in terms of scheduled times and by how far off of scheduled time a train was. On the Eire Railroad, a "time interval system" was used into the 1850's.
As railroads grew bigger and busier, the hour interval fell by the wayside, but the concept continued with shorter headways. It should be obvious that suitable watches would be needed to apply rules similar to this. Accordingly, there is documentation that as early as 1850, the Boston and Providence Railroad ordered 45 English watches, from Bond & Son, Boston, for use in just such circumstances. The Pennsylvania Rail Road also purchased watches and published this rule.
Some of the earliest American machine-made watches went right into railroad service. The American Watch Co. furnished some model 1857 Appleton, Tracy & Co. watches to the P.R.R. in 1866 and the Elgin B.W. Raymond, built in 1867, also saw service on the Pennsylvania Rail Road. Both of these had dials signed for the railroad. Of course the Pennsy wasn't the only customer for these watches and a large number probably only rode the rails when their owners took a trip somewhere. Nevertheless, these two were typical of watches used in railroad time service on those roads specifying watches of a certain minimum quality.
It is widely believed that Webb C. Ball was instrumental in bringing about a unification of time inspection standards, which included watch requirements, in the early 1890's. However significant his contribution might have been, there was definition of standard time and regulated watch inspection as much as forty years prior to Ball's involvement in the 1890's. The American Railway Association held a meeting in 1887 which resulted in defining the form of watch certificate. This form was accepted by the majority of railroads with only minor changes and remained in use for a century. The same meeting did a lot to bring uniformity to the various rules in use on the different roads. Just the same, Ball was well respected and his time service grew to control the inspection on half of the U.S.'s railroads.
Over several decades, leading into the 1890's, the standard watch continued as an 18-size, 15-jewel watch, adjusted to positions. Very few manufacturers specified just how many positions the watches were adjusted to, but three was typical. Occasionally, a watch would be specified as adjusted to all positions, but there seems to be some disagreement as whether that meant five or six positions.
In 1891, Dueber-Hampden introduced and heavily promoted a new line of 18-size, 17-jewel, standard watches and in doing so, created a demand that upset the entire marketplace. Illinois introduced its 16-jewel Bunn as the highest grade in its line in late 1891. At almost the same time, Columbus brought out its new high grade Railway King models, starting with a 16-jewel movement.
By the first decade of the new century, 17-jewel watches were beginning to fade and 21-jewel (and higher) watches became firmly entrenched. Although 18-size watches were the industry workhorse during this period, new model 16-size watches began to appear in significant quantities. Hamilton's 992 was the most successful of these with over 100,000 sold in just a few short years. An increasing variety of other 16-size standard watches were produced. During the early years of the twentieth century, despite Ball's rules for the Cleveland & Pittsburg(h) Division of the P.R.R. (see Figure 6), the move towards tighter requirements occurred. By 1908 the widely known and familiar requirements were almost universally in place.