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Can this be true?
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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 prevail 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 spec and told we have always done it that way and
wonder what horse's ass came up with that, 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 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. 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
behind.
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