title: Station clock
text: # 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
  