Can you have a time without a date in rails?

There's this gem tod, TimeOfDay which provides functionality like that.

https://github.com/JackC/tod

The Time object in Ruby uses "Unix Time" to store temporal points as seconds since January 1, 1970 00:00 UTC. Various methods such as strftime merely change the format of the output, but not how the object is stored internally.

So you have a decision to make: keep your imported data as a Time object, and be mindful of what it actually contains, or import your data as a string but forgo all the lovely, useful features of Time.