[OT] US Rail Guage...

[quentisl@leaves.qjc.cjb.net (OgO)]

I had this forwarded to me, thought it might be of interest to 
someone out there :)



Ever Wonder Why?...

The US standard railroad gauge (width between the two rails) is 
4
feet, 8.5 inches. That's an exceedingly odd number.

Why was that gauge used?  Because  that's the way they built 
them
in England, and the US railroads were built by English 
expatriates.

Why did the English build them like that?  Because the first 
rail
lines were built by the same people who built the pre-railroad 
tramways,
and that's the gauge they used.

Why did "they" use that gauge then?  Because the people who 
built
the tramways used the same jigs and tools that they used for 
building wagons
which used that wheel spacing.

Okay! Why did the wagons have that particular odd wheel spacing?
Well, if they tried to use any other spacing, the wagon wheels 
would
break on some of the old, long distance roads in England, 
because that's the
spacing of the wheel ruts.

So who built those old rutted roads?  The first long distance 
roads
in Europe (and England) were built by Imperial Rome for their 
legions.
The roads have been used ever since.

And the ruts in the roads?  Roman war chariots first formed the
initial ruts, which everyone else had To match for fear of 
destroying
their wagon wheels. Since the chariots were made for (or by) 
Imperial
Rome, they were all alike in the matter of Wheel spacing.

The United States standard railroad gauge of 4 feet, 8.5 inches
derives from the original specification for an Imperial Roman 
war
chariot.

Specifications and bureaucracies live forever.  So the next time
you are handed a specification and wonder what horse's ass came 
up with it,
you may be exactly right, because the Imperial Roman war 
chariots were
made just wide enough to accommodate the back ends of two war 
horses.
Thus, we have the answer to the original question.

Now the extraterrestrial twist to the story...

When we see a Space Shuttle sitting on its launch pad, there are
two big booster rockets attached to the sides of the main fuel 
tank.  These
are solid rocket boosters, or SRBs.  The SRBs are made by 
Thiokol at
their factory in Utah.   The engineers who designed the SRBs 
might have
preferred to make them a bit fatter, but the SRBs had to be 
shipped by
train from the factory to the launch site.

The railroad line from the factory had to run through a tunnel 
in
the mountains.  The SRBs had to fit through that tunnel.  The 
tunnel is
slightly wider than the railroad track, and the railroad track 
is about
as wide as two horses'  behinds. So, the major design feature of 
what is
arguably the world's most advanced transportation system was 
determined
over two thousand years ago by the width of a horse's ass.

And you wonder why it's so hard to get ahead in this world.

Regards

OgO
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