Station clock
# Station clock

A station clock is a clock at a railway station that provides a standard indication of time to both passengers and railway staff.

A railway station will often have several station clocks. They can be found in a clock tower, in the booking hall or office, on the concourse, inside a train shed, on or facing the station platforms, or elsewhere.

## Design

The design of station clocks in Europe was formerly quite diverse. Today, the majority of them are derived from the Swiss railway clock designed by Hans Hilfiker, a Swiss engineer, in 1944 when he was an employee of the Swiss Federal Railways. In 1953, Hilfiker added a red second hand to its design in the shape of a railway guard's signaling disc. The technical implementation of the railway clock, the central synchronization by a master clock, was engineered together with Mobatime, a clock manufacturer still producing the Swiss railway clock as well as the German railway clock besides many others.

Modern European station standard station clock designs have a white clock face that is illuminated in the dark, bar shaped black coloured marks or scales, but no numbers, at the periphery of the clock face dial, and bar-shaped hour and minute hands, also coloured black. The second hand on these standard designs is a thin bar, thickened or fitted with a disc at the peripheral end, and often coloured red. Such clock designs are easily legible from a distance.

## Examples

* Older European station clocks
* King's Cross, London
* Hamburg Hauptbahnhof
* Gare de Lyon, Paris
* Waterloo, London
* Modern European station clocks
* Round face, with curved pointers.
* Square face, with straight edged pointers.
* Modern German station clock next to split-flap display board.
* Customised design (Heidelberg Hbf)
* Aarau station clock with a 9 m diameter
* Modern European standard station clock designs
* Swiss railway clock, the "mother" of the modern railway clocks
* Belgium
* Classic German DB station clock
* Dutch NS station clock
* Jakarta MRT station clock
