It took the English to create outside flanges Thank God they did not invent Scotch or Drambuie.
Now for some S trolley poles. Why don't you put out a kit for the WCF&N observation car in S? I'm 86 +. John Armstrong ----- Original Message ----- From: Marty.Thorin To: [email protected] ; David Scott Sent: Wednesday, January 21, 2009 10:29 PM Subject: {S-Scale List} RE: Has everyone seen this? Ah, the old Roman horses butt story has arrived again. This hoax has been around for years. (I too was fooled for several years.) Five feet is the width of track of Welch miners in the 1600s. They used horse power, wooden rails, and the flanges were on the OUTSIDE of the wheels. So the five foot gauge was to the OUTSIDE of the rails. This was great at three miles per hour. Add steam power in the early 1800s and thus began speed race. Around a tight curve and the outer wheels raised up and lost contact with the rail. Because the flanges were on the outside, the other wheel promptly slid off the rail into a spectacular wreck. Moving the flanges to the inside fixed the problem. Only now the track needed to be laid for INSIDE flanges. Subtracting the width of the rails (plus a little wiggle room) gave four feet, eight and one-half inches. Most railroads today use four feet, nine inches and go as much as nine and a quarter on curves. (This widening also has a story, but today's story is just the original width.) Finally, wagons were built to all kinds of widths to not fall in and thus AVOID the ruts. Thorin __________________________________________________________ 4a. Has everyone seen this? Posted by: "David Scott" [email protected] dscottassociates Date: Sun Jan 18, 2009 12:36 pm ((PST)) Subject: AN INTERESTING HISTORY LESSON Railroad tracks. This is fascinating. Be sure to read the final paragraph; your understanding of it will depend on the earlier part of the content. 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 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. 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. 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 it?' you may be exactly right. Imperial Roman army chariots were madejust 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 SRB's. The SRB's are made by Thiokol at their factory in Utah . The engineers who designed the SRB's would have preferred t o make them a bit fatter, but the SRB's 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 SRB's had to fit through that tunnel. The tunnel is slightly wide! r 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. __________ Information from ESET NOD32 Antivirus, version of virus signature database 3787 (20090121) __________ The message was checked by ESET NOD32 Antivirus. http://www.eset.com [Non-text portions of this message have been removed] ------------------------------------ Yahoo! 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