Fw: Engineering Lesson NON SCIROCCOO!!

["Mike" <lerb@redrose.net>]

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From: OTTOERICH@aol.com
Full-name: OTTOERICH
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Date: Sat, 30 Oct 1999 08:55:18 EDT
Subject: Engineering Lesson
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Subject:   a lesson in history

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.
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?
Roman war chariots first made the initial ruts, which everyone else had
to match for fear of destroying their wagon wheels and wagons. 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 war chariot.
Specifications and bureaucracies live forever. So, the next time you are
handed a specification and wonder which horse's rear 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.

And now, the twist to the story...
There's an interesting extension to the story about railroad gauges and
horses' behinds. 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.
Thiokol makes the SRBs at their factory at 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 by the width of a Horse's
ass!