The peculiar behavior of a station clock is due to the special conditions of railway operations. Firstly, the railway timetable doesn't use seconds; trains always depart the station on the minute. Secondly, all clocks in a station must run synchronously to provide passengers and railway staff with a consistent time throughout the station. Station clocks are therefore minute-jumping secondary clocks, which receive an electrical impulse from a central master clock every minute and cause the minute hand to advance by one minute electromechanically. The second hand is driven independently of the master clock by an electric motor and takes only about 58.5 seconds to complete one revolution. The hand then pauses briefly at the 12 o'clock position and begins a new revolution with the next minute impulse from the master clock. This so-called "premature" second hand was developed in 1955 by the Swiss engineer Hans Hilfiker in collaboration with the watch manufacturer Mobatime and is now used worldwide.
This application is implemented as an SVG file with embedded JavaScript. It can be displayed on a website or directly in a browser without any programming knowledge. You can freely combine the clock face, hands, hand behavior, axle cover, and hand shadows, and then download the finished SVG file.
Here are some examples:
Using
You can embed the station clock in an HTML page or display it directly in a browser. Since all the settings you've made above are written into an SVG file during the download, it's very easy to use.
<html>
<body>
<object data="stationclock.svg" type="image/svg+xml">
</object>
</body>
</html>
Please note that the SVG is embedded in HTML using an object tag. The obvious image tag won't work because JavaScript execution is blocked there for security reasons.
You can also define the clock's properties using object parameters in the HTML source. Here you can copy your settings from above as parameters and paste them into your HTML code.
Finally, the clock can also be set via URL parameters:
Download
This software is licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL), which includes the right to run, study, modify, and distribute the software.