I found out yesterday a strange geographic fact.
Working and traveling abroad requires me to be up to date with time zones; which always gets me to thinking about the curious case of South Australia, which has a 30 minute difference to the Eastern Seaboard. I don’t know anywhere else in the world that has gone for the half hour time zone.
But that’s not the strange thing. What had me scratching noggin is how there is town within New South Wales, which has Sydney as the capital and is on the east coast, that goes by the South Australian time zone, not the time zone of the state it is in. It would be the equivalent of San Fran being on Mountain time.
This town has the romantic name of Broken Hill, and fun fact, was where the huge mining company, BHP, was founded (Broken Hill Proprietary).
This quirk is due to Broken Hill’s closeness to the SA border, and how the only train line connected them to South Australia, not their home state. Thanks to the train line, and then tradition, Broken Hill continues to be 30 minutes behind the rest of the state.