We used to do that in the 19th century before standard time was a thing with railways.

No, with railroads each city had their own time. I'm not suggesting that. I'm saying that time zones should be arranged so that solar noon falls close to 12pm. With DST solar noon can be as late as 1:30pm, or perhaps even later in badly designed time zones. That's dumb. Solar noon should be close to noon. We shouldn't mess with that. If that makes certain other things like commuting or sending kids to school inconvenient, we should change the hours at which those activities happen.

Or, just use UTC for the time for everything and never change it. Then everyone's in the same time zone, and you no longer have to wonder what time it is in Baku. You'd still have to do a bit of digging to know what normal work hours and normal sleeping hours are in Baku if you wanted to contact someone there though.