OK - sounds like some of you know the story anyway...
The space shuttle connection, which somebody has already said may be a bit apocryphal, is that the diameter of the solid booster rockets was to some extent constrained by the fact that they have to travel by railway (standard gauge) from the manufacturer to where they are mated to the rest of the shuttle rocket for final transport to Cape Canaveral for launch.
The rail line passes through a number of tunnels on the way, so the diameter of the booster rockets is set by the railway tunnel diameter.
The "flaw" in the argument is that the diameter of the tunnel is not necessarily directly related to the distance between the rails - however the story goes that the horse's arse dimension has thus been carried over to the design of the space shuttle.
I won't be so readily drawn on the other stories.
Cheers
Wombat
P.S the Stockton & Darlington railway was steam powered, whilst the Middleton Railway, if my memory serves me right, was horse-drawn.
At 07:57 AM 12/11/2004 +1100, Derek R wrote:
Funny that, the standard gauge railway used in Britain was based on the distance between the wheels of Roman Chariots: Wheel ruts on the (still remaining) Roman cobbled roads at the time led to wagon makers using the same spacing, and when the wagon makers made the first railway carriages, they used the same spacing of 4 feet 8 and a half inches.
And so this thread eventually returns to the horses arse... though I will wait for Wombat to supply the connection with the Space Shuttle
Incidentally for anyone interested, the Srockton and Darlington railway was not the first railway in the world (opened 1825): it was preceded by the Middleton Railway in Leeds, which was opened in 1758.
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