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Trains Of Thought
By Michael Schwaba, 19 Feb 10:57
Train Tracks - How did we get from there to here?
This little piece of history has been floating around e-mail land for quite a while. Here is a look into the corporate mind that is interesting, educational, historical and amusing. True or False? Read and decide for yourself. Then read the next article entitled “Trains of Thought - De-Railed?”
The US standard railroad gauge (width between the two rails) is 4 feet, 8.5 inches. That is an odd number. Why was that gauge used?
Because that's the way they built them in England, and the US railroads were built (& financed) 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 that 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 was the spacing between 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?
The initial ruts, which everyone else had to match for fear of destroying their wagon wheels, were first formed by Roman war chariots. 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 specifications 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 on, 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 twist....
There's an interesting twist to the story about railroad gauges and horses' behinds: 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 SRB's 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, which 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!
Hail Caesar…
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