In response to the post by Richard Krajunus, here is some additional information from the zoneinfo database used by most computers to track these kinds of changes:
# From Paul Eggert (1993-11-18):
#
# Howse writes that Britain was the first country to use standard time.
# The railways cared most about the inconsistencies of local mean time,
# and it was they who forced a uniform time on the country.
# The original idea was credited to Dr. William Hyde Wollaston (1766-1828)
# and was popularized by Abraham Follett Osler (1808-1903).
# The first railway to adopt London time was the Great Western Railway
# in November 1840; other railways followed suit, and by 1847 most
# (though not all) railways used London time. On 1847-09-22 the
# Railway Clearing House, an industry standards body, recommended that GMT be
# adopted at all stations as soon as the General Post Office permitted it.
# The transition occurred on 12-01 for the L&NW, the Caledonian,
# and presumably other railways; the January 1848 Bradshaw's lists many
# railways as using GMT. By 1855 the vast majority of public
# clocks in Britain were set to GMT (though some, like the great clock
# on Tom Tower at Christ Church, Oxford, were fitted with two minute hands,
# one for local time and one for GMT). The last major holdout was the legal
# system, which stubbornly stuck to local time for many years, leading
# to oddities like polls opening at 08:13 and closing at 16:13.
# The legal system finally switched to GMT when the Statutes (Definition
# of Time) Act took effect; it received the Royal Assent on 1880-08-02.
#
# In the tables below, we condense this complicated story into a single
# transition date for London, namely 1847-12-01. We don't know as much
# about Dublin, so we use 1880-08-02, the legal transition time.
Sorry I couldn't respond using a comment in that thread; StackOverflow does not deem me worthy of that yet.