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  1. #1
    Join Date
    Apr 2006
    Location
    NW of KSTL
    Posts
    2,554

    Default It All Started with Horses

    .....or rather their butts. Allow me to explain!


    Railroad Tracks: The US standard railroad gauge (distance betweenthe 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 designed 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 had used for building wagons, which used that wheel spacing.

    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 (including England ) for their legions. Those 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. Therefore, the United States standard railroad gauge of 4 feet, 8.5 inches is derived from the original specifications for an Imperial Roman war chariot. Bureaucracies live forever.

    So the next time you are handed a specification/ procedure/ process and wonder 'What horse's ass came up with this?' , you may be exactly right. Imperial Roman army chariots were made just wide enough to accommodate the
    rear ends of two war horses. (Two horses' asses.)

    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 in 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, and 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 ass. And you thought being a horse's ass wasn't important? Historically, ancient horse's asses controlled almost everything related to transportation...

    I always say it is truly a waste of a day if ya don't learn something new!

    You are very welcome!

  2. #2
    Join Date
    Jun 2006
    Location
    Massachusetts
    Posts
    24,521

    Default Re: It All Started with Horses

    Hysterical, Dave!

  3. #3
    Join Date
    Jun 2011
    Posts
    7

    Default Re: It All Started with Horses

    Quote Quoting cbg
    View Post
    Hysterical, Dave!
    Sure..thats it.

  4. #4
    Join Date
    Sep 2010
    Posts
    19,901

    Default Re: It All Started with Horses

    Too bad it's not quite true.

    The railroad gauge was not determined by Roman Chariots but in fact by sleds. While the track width by and large was due to horse drawn apparatus, the gauge varied widely. The horse's ass-width doesn't enter into it to much. The sleds were often drawn by only one. The width picked was a blend of practicallity (wide enough to be stable and provide useful load, narrow enough to be manouverable). It was just the brits who settled down on that one particular size. In fact, even in the UK, the gauges varied up to as much as 7' before 4' 8.5 was adopted as the best compromise. The Russians to this day still use 5' gauge.

    As for the space shuttle, the gauge itself isn't directly related to the size of the tunnel. Train cars (and their cargo) are wider than the gauge. In fact, when you travel from Russia into Europe, they just hoist up the passenger cars at Brest-Litovsk and replace the wider gauge trucks with the narrow gauge trucks. While tunnel size may have entered into it, if you look at this picture (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:NA..._SRB's.jpg), you'll see the booster sections were already much wider than the standard railroad rolling stock and substantially wider than the track gauge.

    But don't let the facts get in the way of a good punchline.

  5. #5
    Join Date
    Apr 2006
    Location
    NW of KSTL
    Posts
    2,554

    Default Re: It All Started with Horses

    There's always one.

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