(erielack) Interesting

[gelwood <gelwood_@_dnaco.net>]

The US  standard railroad gauge (width between the two 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 the US railroads
were built 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 tool 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? 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?  Roman war chariots first formed the initial
ruts, which  everyone else had to match for fear of destroying  their
wagon
wheels.  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 specification 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, because the Imperial
Roman
war  chariots were made just wide enough to accommodate the back ends of
two war  horses; i.e., the decision was made based upon horses'
asses!!!!!!

Thus,  we have the answer to the original question. Now the
extra-terrestrial twist to  the story...

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 SRBs 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.
The  tunnel  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.

And you wonder why it's  so hard to get ahead in this world.


George Elwood
http://www.dnaco.net/~gelwood

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