Sorry for the dashes, I don't have my cleaner program on this build.
William Robb
From: Cotty Subject: Re: At long last: UK photos on line
Yeah, well. What did the Romans ever do for us????
Subject: Fw: Why We Built It That Way
> 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 the US railroads > were > built by English expatriates. > > Why did the English people 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 use that odd wheel spacing? Well, if they
tried
> to > use any other spacing the wagons would break on some of the old,long > distance roads, because that's the spacing of the old wheel ruts. > > So who built these old rutted roads? The first long distance roads in > Europe > were built by Imperial Rome for the benefit of their legions. The
roads
> have been used ever since. > > And the ruts? The initial ruts, which everyone else had to match for > fear of > destroying their wagons, were first made by Roman war chariots. > > Since the chariots were made for or by Imperial Rome they were all
alike
> in > the matter of wheel spacing. > > Thus, we have the answer to the original question. The United States > standard railroad gauge of 4 feet, 8.5 inches derives from the original > specification for an Imperial Roman army war chariot. > > Specs 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 chariots were made to be just > wide > enough to accommodate the backends of two war horses. > > Now the twist to the story.... There's an interesting extension of the > story > about railroad gauge and horses' behinds. When we see a Space Shuttle > sitting on the launch pad, there are two big > booster rockets attached to the sides of the main fuel tank. These are > the > solid rocket boosters, or SRBs. The SRBs are made by Thiokol at a > 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 to the factory runs through a > tunnel > in the mountains. The SRBs had to fit through that tunnel. > > The tunnel is slightly wider than a railroad track, and the railroad > track > is about as wide as two horses' behinds. So a major design feature of > what > is arguably the world's most advanced transportation system was > determined > by the width of a horse's Ass! >
