Did the government create standard time zones?

No. American railroads adopted the system voluntarily in 1883 through industry coordination. Congress did not pass a law establishing standard time zones until 1918, decades after the practice was already nationwide.

Why did cities go along with a system the railroads designed for themselves?

A functioning national transportation and communication network required a shared clock, and the railroads were the only party positioned to publish and enforce one. Following their standard was more useful to a city than defending its own solar noon.

Did every city adopt it right away?

No. Most did within a year or two, but a few cities kept local solar time for years longer, illustrating that even a highly beneficial coordination shift can have slow, uneven adopters.

science · 1883

Standard Railway Time: The Day America Agreed on the Clock

Before 1883, a train traveler crossing the country could reset a pocket watch dozens of times, because every city kept its own solar noon. The railroads fixed it in a single afternoon, with no law behind them at all.

Facts drawn from the Library of Congress, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, and Encyclopaedia Britannica; interpretive framing is labeled as modeled analysis.

Before 1883, American cities and towns each set their clocks to local solar noon, so a train timetable had to account for dozens of slightly different local times along a single route. Railroads sometimes ran on the home-city time of their headquarters, which created scheduling confusion and real safety hazards on shared track.

[VERIFIED] On November 18, 1883, remembered as the day of two noons, American and Canadian railroads adopted a system of four standard time zones designed by railway engineer William F. Allen for the General Time Convention, resetting clocks across the continent within a single afternoon.

Play the same structure: The Two Noons Problem.

Sources

[VERIFIED] On November 18, 1883, American and Canadian railroads adopted four standard time zones Library of Congress, Today in History, November 18
[VERIFIED] The history and mechanics of standard time and time zone adoption National Institute of Standards and Technology, A Walk Through Time: Standard Time and Time Zones
[VERIFIED] Congress did not legally codify standard time zones until the Standard Time Act of 1918 Encyclopaedia Britannica, standard time