Synchronise your life with the U-Bahn

Did you know? The clocks at all Munich U/S-Bahn stations are automatically synchronised with Germany's official timepiece, the Caesium powered atomic clock at the Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt in Braunschweig, northern Germany. The synchronisation works via the airwaves. A radio transmitter at Mainflingen, some 25Kms South East of Frankfurt, continously broadcasts a longwave radio signal at 77,5 kHz which encodes the current time in binary format. Listen to a sample - there are 8 tones, the 4th tone being the longest and signalling the start of a new minute. The radio signal can travel up to 2,000 Km thus covering the whole of Germany and beyond. Of course it's not just the Munich U-Bahn which uses this system to keep time but also TV stations, hospitals, Deutsche Bahn, the airports, and possibly even your own bedside alarm clock. So if you're out and about in Munich and happen to need the correct time, use one of the MVV clocks. They are accurate to one second in a million years! ...

[img]http://www.toytowngermany.com/munich/u-bahn-clock.jpg[/img]

Are you sure it's not just the smaller digital clocks at the far ends of the platforms (in the direction of travel) that are syncronised like this? I always use those to set my watch because the big ones on the platform (as shown in your picture) sometimes show different times.

Yep. Big clocks are synchronised also. If you watch carefully you can even see the synchronisation happen. Sometimes the clock mechanism is fast. The second hand will zip around the face in something like 55 seconds. Then when it reaches the 12 o'clock position it'll actually pause for 5 seconds so as to reset itself. Me being the trainspotter that I am, I observed the clocks at Mu Freiheit, Marienplatz, Sendlinger Tor and Hauptbahnhof. All clocks were synchronised except the one (and that was because it's second hand had fallen off!). If you see a clock with the wrong time then it's because it's kaput.

It's a shame that the busses aren't synchronised to the same time. My bus in the morning is regularly 5-7 minutes behind the timetable, and Monday this week either two of them didn't show or the one that did was a staggering 22 minutes late.

I wonder why they don't change the timetable to make it achievable?

Buses too are surely synchronized to the atomic clock, but they often get caught in traffic or face other hurdles to get them to the next station on time. In complaining once that my bus was habitually too early (get that!), the bus company advised me to always be at the stop 5 minutes earlier just in case, that a bus driver will not wait and does not have to!

I actually dont believe this bollox , there's so many u-bahn clocks that are wrong and its not because they're kaput because they're still moving round. The one at Westfriedhof I see every work day is 5 mins out for example, the one at olympiazentrum is also inaccurate. It's not my watch as the most (90%) are correct. So something not quite right with this

Where can I get a working clock featuring that (LED-second-hand) and digital display like the one in the Munich U-Bahn? I recall the brand on these is found at www.ese-web.com. They have something like it but it's very expensive. I'd like a consumer version.

Mark

I remember seeing something like them at the Kaufhof on Marienplatz...