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Many years ago my grandmother gave me this beautiful American Waltham pocket watch. At the time she told me that it was the railroad watch that her father used as a conductor for the Chicago Northwestern. I thanked her for it but put it in a drawer since it didn't work and I didn't have the resources to fix it at the time (fresh out of college, dirt poor, you know...). A few years ago I came across it again, I decided to have it cleaned and repaired and developed a new interest in it, unfortunately a bit too late for me to ask my grandmother more questions about her father or the watch.
I'll leave you to decide, is it a real railroad watch? There's a lot going against it, for starters the Roman numerals, then there's the stem at 3 O'Clock and the relatively small number of jewels in the movement. It does have the setting lever under the crystal though, which was a key feature, and the repairman dated it around 1885, a time when the railroads still largely had their own rules and were constantly changing them. The big collision that caused the standardization hadn't happened yet, that occured on april 19th 1891 where it was determined that an engineer's pocket watch had stopped for 4 minutes causing a passenger and freight train to collide. It's possible that they accepted this watch for use (already owned it, a conductor not an engineer), my grandmother seemed to think so...
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