Thanks, that summary agrees with the information I've gleaned: for Zurich Shanks is wrong, and so are the Swiss astrology books. It seems pretty clear that if you asked someone for the time in (say) Zurich in 1855, the answer you'd get would depend on who you were talking to. Legally speaking the local time might have been one thing, but the telegraph and railway time another. But even with that in mind, the transitions in Shanks and in the tz database and in the Swiss astrology books all seem to disagree with any reasonable interpretation of "civil time in Zurich". What a mess, eh? For astrological applications I expect you'd want to know what times the midwives and doctors kept -- that should be more important than railway time per se (not too many babies were born in railway stations....). It may be difficult, though, to find out this info for Zurich, much less for all Switzerland. <http://www.hls-dhs-dss.ch/textes/d/D12813.php> makes it appear that the 1894 transition was not a smooth one either -- I suspect that each canton or locality had to make the legal change on its own, and they didn't change all at the same time, and in that sense the 1894 transition datum is dubious too.