{"id":32684,"date":"2026-03-29T00:01:24","date_gmt":"2026-03-29T07:01:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/exhaustnotes.us\/blog\/?p=32684"},"modified":"2026-03-29T07:33:27","modified_gmt":"2026-03-29T14:33:27","slug":"ball-watch-trainmaster","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/exhaustnotes.us\/blog\/index.php\/2026\/03\/29\/ball-watch-trainmaster\/","title":{"rendered":"Ball Watch Trainmaster"},"content":{"rendered":"
By Joe Berk<\/h6>\n

A disclaimer up front:\u00a0 I don’t own the Ball Watch Trainmaster GMT you see above, and I don’t actually have one to review.\u00a0 In fact, I’ve never seen one in person.\u00a0 But I sure want one.\u00a0 Sometimes it’s fun to think about buying something for a while without actually pulling the trigger.\u00a0 One such item for me is the Ball Trainmaster GMT watch, as seen in the photo above.\u00a0 Part of the desire is the watch’s design, and part of it is the Ball Watch heritage.<\/p>\n

I like the Trainmaster’s bold face and big numbers.\u00a0 Some have criticized the watch’s wonky font, but I like it.\u00a0 If you look closely at the numeral 7, you’ll see the Ball designers did a cool thing there.\u00a0 The sharp contrast between the blue hands and the white face works well, and the GMT red hand stands out, too.\u00a0 It’s just a cool face; one I know I wouldn’t get tired of checking.<\/p>\n

The appeal of a GMT is real for me.\u00a0 I used to need one when working for CSC and when I was in the defense industry.\u00a0 I’ve had projects in Chongqing, Kayseri, Tel Aviv, Haifa, Athens, Mexico, Glasgow, and Medellin, and knowing the local times instantly with a simple glance at my watch was a good thing.\u00a0 It kept me from waking people up in the middle of their night and it let me know when they should be at their workstations.\u00a0 These days I don’t have any overseas activities, but I still like the idea of a good GMT watch.\u00a0 They’re just cool.<\/p>\n

About that name:\u00a0 The Trainmaster.\u00a0 Ball has a history rooted in the railroad industry.\u00a0 You’ll see it on every Ball watch with the letters RR (which stand for railroad).\u00a0 It started 135 years ago with Webb C. Ball and a deadly railroad disaster.<\/p>\n

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Back in the day, trains used to coordinate their travel such that one would pull off onto a siding (a parallel track) so another (going in the opposite direction) could pass.\u00a0 You can guess where this story was going.\u00a0 In the Great Tipton Train Wreck (as it came to be known), one of the conductor’s watches lost four minutes and it didn’t coordinate correctly with the train going in the opposite direction.\u00a0 Webb Ball, a Cleveland jeweler, investigated the two watches used by the conductors on the two trains and found a 4-minute discrepancy.\u00a0 After that, Ball became the go-to guy for all railroad time-keeping issues\u00a0 \u00a0He started a watch company and Ball watches became the standard for all US rail activities.\u00a0 It’s where the expression “on the ball” comes from.\u00a0 If you were running on schedule, you were “on the Ball” (meaning you were on time).<\/p>\n

Today’s Ball watches (including the Trainmaster) have a unique feature:\u00a0 Their illuminated hands and time indicators.\u00a0 The conventional luminosity approach other watches use is to incorporate photoluminescent pigments on the watch hands and numbers (or markers near the numbers).\u00a0 The luminescent pigments absorb photons from exterior light sources like the sun or other strong lights.\u00a0 \u00a0The problem with this conventional lume approach is that it loses luminescence relatively quickly, and the lume doesn’t glow as brightly as the watch ages.<\/p>\n

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Ball’s approach is different.\u00a0 Instead of using conventional watch lume materials, Ball incorporates what they refer to as micro gas tubes that stay bright.\u00a0 These are tiny phosphor-coated glass tubes located in the watch hands and the numbers (or watch face markers) that contain tritium gas.\u00a0 The micro gas tubes stay bright with no intensity diminishment.\u00a0 They’re said to be good for 25 years.\u00a0 Different Ball watches place the micro gas tubes in different locations.\u00a0 On the Trainmaster, they are in the hour, minute, and second hands, and in markers by each number on the face.\u00a0 There’s no marker in the GMT hand (I guess Ball thinks you don’t need to know the time elsewhere in the world at night).<\/p>\n

Ball offers a couple of relatively unique options on this watch.\u00a0 They will engrave your name for free.\u00a0 You can also select your own serial number that goes on the watch face (if someone else hasn’t already selected it).\u00a0 When Ball first announced these, I checked, and 007 was available.\u00a0 Today, though, it’s not. I guess James Bond already ordered his.<\/p>\n

As I said at the start of this blog, I’d like to own a Trainmaster, but not badly enough to actually shell out the cash owning one would require.\u00a0 The Trainmaster retails for something north of $3,000.\u00a0 Poking around a bit on the Internet, I found places that sell the Trainmaster in the $2500 to $2600 range, but that’s still pretty rarefied air for a watch I don’t need.<\/p>\n

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