Question

Passage:

Prior to the late nineteenth century, timekeeping was entirely local. Every town set its clocks to solar noon—the moment the sun reached its highest point in the sky. While this system was perfectly adequate for agricultural societies, it created immense confusion for the rapidly expanding railroad networks. Because each town maintained its own time, a train journey of only a few dozen miles could involve crossing multiple local time zones, making the scheduling of arrivals and departures nearly impossible and causing frequent, catastrophic collisions on single-track lines.

To solve this mounting logistics crisis, major railroad operators convened in 1883 at the General Time Convention. There, they agreed to partition the continent into four distinct, standardized time zones. Although this change was initiated purely to streamline rail operations, its convenience quickly captured the public’s preference. Because municipal businesses and local citizens relied heavily on train schedules, towns across North America voluntarily abandoned solar timekeeping and synchronized their clocks with the railroad standard, ultimately forcing governments to officially codify standard time into federal law decades later.

Based on the passage, what caused towns across North America to voluntarily abandon solar timekeeping?