Railway tracks

[allan 295]

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 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? Ancient horse's asses control almost everything...

and

CURRENT Horses Asses are controlling everything else !

Cheers

[Mark 178]

Well into the 19th century the U.S. still did not have one "standard" railroad gauge. At the time of the Civil War, even though nearly all of the Confederacy's railroad equipment had come from the North or from Britain (of the 470 locomotives built in the U.S. in 1860, for example, only 19 were manufactured in the South), 113 different railroad companies in the Confederacy operated on three different gauges of track. This lack of standardization was, as historian James McPherson points out, one of the many reasons the Union was able to finally vanquish the Confederacy militarily:

In other words, there was nothing inevitable about a railroad gauge supposedly traceable to the size of wheel ruts in Imperial Rome. Had the Civil War taken a different course, the eventual standard railroad gauge used throughout North America might well have been different than the current one.

Now, as for that Space Shuttle addendum . . . When Thiokol was building the solid rocket boosters (SRB) for the space shuttle, they had to keep shipping considerations in mind, but they didn't necessarily have to alter their design because any particular tunnel that lay between their plant and the Florida launch site wasn't large enough. (The original article implies that one specific railroad tunnel was a cause for concern, but since the location of the tunnel isn't identified, it's difficult to evaluate that claim.) In any case, railroads don't run through tunnels only "slightly wider than the railroad track" unless every one of their engines and all their rolling stock is also only "slightly wider than the railroad track." (And unless the tunnels encompass only a single set of tracks, of course). Data from the U.S. Army's Rail Transport in a Theater of Operations document, for example, makes it fairly clear that one would be hard-pressed to find railroad equipment anywhere only "slightly wider" than 4 feet, 8.5 inches.

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