Railroads and
Transportation
Does the statement, "We've always
done it that way" ring any bells? ... read to the
end... it was a new one for me.
The US standard railroad gauge
(distance between the 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 English expatriates built the
US Railroads.
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?
Imperial Rome built the first long distance roads in Europe
(and England) for their legions. The roads have been used ever
since. And the ruts in the roads?
Roman war chariots formed the initial
ruts, which everyone else had to match for fear of
destroying their wagon wheels. Since the chariots were made for
Imperial Rome, they were all alike in the matter of wheel
spacing...
The United States standard railroad gauge of 4
feet, 8.5 inches is derived from the original specifications for
an Imperial Roman war chariot. 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 army chariots were made just wide enough to accommodate the
back ends of two war horses.
Now the twist to the story
When
you 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 at Utah. The engineers who designed the SRBs would
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 happens 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, as you now know, is about as wide as two horses'
behinds. So, a major Space Shuttle 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
rear.
..... and you thought being a HORSE'S
ASS wasn't important!
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