Re: Fw: Engineering Lesson NON SCIROCCOO!!

[ferret100@juno.com]

LIving is the Washington, DC area, I can say I've seen alot of things
determined by a horse's ass!

B.

'82 Scirocco (aka "Fritz")
'85 Jetta

On Sun, 31 Oct 1999 09:25:01 -0500 "Mike" <lerb@redrose.net> writes:
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>Non Scirocco but never the less amusing.
>
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>Full-name: OTTOERICH
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>Date: Sat, 30 Oct 1999 08:55:18 EDT
>Subject: Engineering Lesson
>To: WardBoyce@aol.com
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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!
>
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