What Time Is It?

By Jim Mathews / President & CEO

Well, for one thing, it’s RailNation:Tucson time! Or almost. RailNation:Tucson kicks off this Friday, and I’m really looking forward to seeing you there. By visiting Arizona, we’ll be bringing the national conversation about passenger rail’s explosive growth and bright future to one of the places where that future burns brightest.

The RailNation:Tucson program is going to be strong, with great speakers including local elected and appointed leaders alongside national figures in passenger rail...including Amtrak CEO Stephen Gardner, among others. You can read more about it here, and if you’re one of those folks who paid for a virtual-attendance registration, you’ll be getting your own individual links for the event. Watch your email and check your spam folder just in case.

But that gets me to the timelier question: when will the meeting begin and when will you be able to watch the virtual stream? That’s more complicated than usual, because Arizona is one of the two states which don’t observe Daylight Savings Time. You know, that’s the old “Spring Forward, Fall Back” time change in which we lose an hour of sleep in the Spring as we set our clocks forward and then get another hour in the Fall when we set our clocks backward.

Arizona sits in the Mountain time zone, but it doesn’t play the clock-switching game. (Neither does Hawaii.) And just to make it even more confusing, parts of Arizona DO observe the time change...specifically, the part of the Navajo Nation that straddles Arizona. It’s not to be obstreperous; Arizona gets, and stays, brutally hot for much of the year and officials there have argued that springing forward puts a lot of outdoor workers at higher risk.

Nonetheless, right now as I write this, clocks for folks in Tucson read 7:49 am – that’s Mountain Standard Time. Denver is also in the Mountain time zone, but right now they’re on Mountain *Daylight* Time, so for them it’s 8:49 am. On Sunday morning, shortly after midnight Saturday, the rest of the country will “fall back” an hour, and the rest of the Mountain time zone will be where Arizona already is: on Mountain Standard Time.

RailNation:Tucson is running on local Mountain Standard Time. If you are attending in person, you won’t need to change your clocks because you’ll already be there. If you’re taking the train or flying? Well, pay very close attention to your departure and arrival times. And if you’re watching the stream, you’ll have to pay especially close attention because sometimes automatic online calendars won’t get the time change correct...and you could find yourself logging in too early or too late.

I can’t tell you in this piece what time it will be specifically where YOU live and where you’ll be watching the stream, but I can urge you to take an extra minute (or maybe even that whole extra hour?) to be sure you’ve correctly adjusted for our conference taking place entirely in Mountain Standard Time.