I'm sure this gets recommended all the time, but "Time Lord: Sir Sandford Fleming and the Creation of Standard Time" is a fascinating (to me anyway) story about the creation of time zones; how and why they came about.
Himself a railroad engineer and present at the driving of the "Last Spike." Quite the individual. I really do like the charm of "cosmopolitan time:"
The zones were labelled A-Y, excluding J, and arbitrarily linked to the Greenwich meridian, which was designated G. All clocks within each zone would be set to the same time as the others, and between zones the alphabetic labels could be used as common notation. So for example cosmopolitan time G:45 would map to local time 14:45 in one zone and 15:45 in the next.
The zones were labelled A-Y, excluding J, and arbitrarily linked to the Greenwich meridian, which was designated G. All clocks within each zone would be set to the same time as the others, and between zones the alphabetic labels could be used as common notation. So for example cosmopolitan time G:45 would map to local time 14:45 in one zone and 15:45 in the next.
From: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandford_Fleming