A tale of time, tachographs and a tiny village in Lincolnshire.

This weekend marks the peak of my?favourite time of the year. Yes, the mellow golden glow of autumn is a wonderful sight, but what makes this weekend all the more special is that I can combine my favourite season, showcase a tiny Lincolnshire village near home, and cover a learning point for my students of the Transport Manager Certificate of Professional Competence qualification.

This weekend the clocks go back (bonus alert, an extra hour in bed). What has all this got to do with TMCPC and a village in Lincolnshire I hear you ask……..UTC dear reader, UTC. What on earth is that may be your follow-up question? Universal Time Co-Ordinated, or in context, the time recorded by all tachographs, regardless of where the vehicle is in the EU to record drivers activities in order to evidence compliance or indeed non-compliance with EU regulation EC561/2006, (ergo, in the UK by retained EU legislation).

Let’s first examine the tachograph and the first learning point. It's important to understand the drivers hours regulations and tachograph regulations are two different pieces of law. The former deals with the amount of driving a driver can do, along with breaks, and?daily and weekly rest requirements, the latter deals with the means of recording those activities and how those records are kept. The tachograph then, what an odd word. It is two words, but two words that must be used together for the one word to make sense (they are called blend words or portmanteau) Tacho is?from the Greek word for speed, or swift, and graph, well that’s a 19th century abbreviation of a ‘graphic’ (illustrative) formula. Of course, the modern tachograph records not only speed, but also distance, time, and importantly driver activities, and in its most recent incarnation, the digital tachograph which has been with us since 2006, allows a driver to create a digital manual record. All of the latter would be too much to put into one word and I doubt that even those notoriously clever ancient Greeks could find a word for all of that, so let's stick with tachograph, but it's not uncommon in the industry for that to revert back to a single word, tacho, which is as we have seen, doesn’t make sense on its own. As a further perversion of the meaning we often hear drivers saying “I need my tacho break” Literally translated as “I need my speed break” When what in fact they mean is that they need to have a break as required by the Drivers Hours Rules EC561/2006.

Although developed in the earliest part of the last century for the German railways, the tachograph today is almost exclusively used for the road transport industry. In the EU then, and for anyone else who has adopted the EU drivers hours rules (i.e., the UK) the tachograph regulations, that is the regulations around the specification, installation, calibration, and use of the tachograph not to mention how we must keep records is contained in EU regulation EC165 2014. Drill down into those regulations and in Article 2 para 2 (x) we learn that the definition of time is ?“a permanent digital record of the coordinated universal date and time (UTC)”

So, the second learning point, what is UTC, or Universal Time Co-Ordinated and what is the reference to a village in Lincolnshire? ?Well UTC is simply another, more widely understood name for Greenwich Mean Time or GMT. So why Greenwich Mean Time? The sun rises in the east and sets in the west just as it has done since the beginning of the world, but as ‘man’ began to explore the world and countries began to trade with one another transport or trade routes began to open up. However, it was difficult to coordinate that trade and navigate the seas because the time, as dictated by the shadow cast by the sun, would be different depending on where in the world you were because the sun rises from its slumber earlier in the east than it does in the west.

A centre point needed to be established on a line (or meridian) defining east and west so that maritime charts could be universally understood, thus as late as 1884 time zones were created with the centre being a line running longitudinally through Greenwich in South London, hence GMT or UTC, time is ‘universally coordinated’ from that point either to the east or west. Why Greenwich? Well, that was the centre of the maritime world where the vast majority of charts were created so it made sense to start it there.

All tachograph records need to be made in UTC which ordinarily wouldn’t give us a problem here in the UK because we sit right in the middle of the GMT/UTC time zone……but we chose to forward that by one hour each spring, returning to GMT in the autumn or as our American friends call it ‘the fall’, indeed this weekend. This practice can be remembered by the phrase ‘spring forward, fall back’. Why would we do this, particularly as it means that either the tachograph clock is an hour in front of UTC in spring or the driver must go into the tachograph menu and adjust the clock back to reflect the ‘local time’ carrying out the same operation in reverse come the fall.....sorry autumn.

The answer goes to back to the First World War when it was used to save power consumed by lighting, and it’s also useful for farmers who can spend longer in the fields at the right time of year. In more modern times the practice is thought to be less useful as modern lighting uses less power and farming methods have changed. Indeed it could be argued that the artificially darker evenings harm road safety.

The Greenwich meridian line continues to run north (and indeed south) through the country and is celebrated in various towns and villages that lay in its path, including the one in the picture in the beautiful Lincolnshire fenland village of Frampton, which is also famous for its amazing RSPB reserve.