Subject:
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Very funny bit of information on the guage of American Railroads (Not directly LEGO related)
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.trains, lugnet.castle, lugnet.space
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Date:
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Wed, 28 Aug 2002 13:34:36 GMT
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Viewed:
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24 times
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OK this is not exactly on topic but it is very funny and is somehow relavent to
Trains, Castle, and Space...
Disclaimer: If you are offended buy a small 3 letter word with one "A" and two
"S's" just stop reading now.
Fair warning....
Does the statement, "We've always done it that way" ring any bells?........
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 war 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 ass.
And you thought being a HORSE'S ASS wasn't important!
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