I happen to know some of that story is false. Romans did not use war chariots. By the time the Romans invaded Britain, chariots had fallen out of use by hundreds of years. The Romans in Britain fought on foot and the Roman roads were for foot soldiers anyway. The Romans did use chariots, which they raced and bet on. But the chariots were 4 horse chariots so the width of the wheels didn’t have anything to do with the size of a horses ass.
The Major’s right on that .I tried to search for some stuff on the history of track gauges. The US especially went thru a lot of different gauges before settling on that standard. I found scores of places with that Roman chariot thing, most of them on HUMOR, pages. Unfortunatly there were so many of those pages that I found very few legitimate ones. Be sure and check the link Cecil provided. Interestingly enough I found a copy of that on one of the humor pages. I did find a few interesting items. Unca mentioned the complicated steps that led to Stephenson arriving at the “odd” gauge. Stephenson MAY or MAY NOT have based his gauge on wagon gauge, wagon gauge is more complicated than RR, it has very little to do with horses ass’s either. He may have based it on the standard sizes of readily available materials. Some of the “oddness” came from a mud allowance, a space between the rail and the flange. The most likely thing I found for the “standard gauge” was a ratio involving center of balance, between the gauge, the height of the trucks (diameter of wheels), width of the cars (overhang past the trucks) ,and height of the cars. We don’t want Phoebe Snow falling off the tracks. I don’t remember the ratio, I am not gonna go try to find it in that mess. But the 'Standard gauge" is a good compromise between the ratio and other practical factors. Now let’s all go to Durango for a ride on the Denver and Rio Grande’s narrow gauge line. Maybe a ride on the Galloping Goose, school buses adapted to run on the mountain tracks.
“Pardon me while I have a strange interlude.” -Marx
http://www.straightdope.com/columns/000218.html
Didn’t want conductor Jil throwing me off the train
Mr. John. Thanks for add the URL.
I just have one more comment to add. The Britons did use chariots, but they were outside of the “known” civilizaton of the time and were considered backwards in military techniques. Any nation that discovered cavalry discarded chariots as a weapon and the Britons did not do that until William the Conqueror brought his cavalry over from Normandy.
Hey all,
Regardless of where this number came from, Did ya ever notice those full-size Chevy and Ford pickups the railroad maintenance crews use to drive around the tracks for various purposes? And did you notice the small steel rail wheels tucked up near the rubber road wheels? And that the width between the flanges of the steel rail wheels matches almost exactly the distance between the insides of the road wheels?
If one assumes the width of standard vehicle tires to be between 10 and 12 inches wide, follow this math. The published center-to-center wheel track widths for Full-size Chevy Silverado 1500, Ford F-150 and Dodge Ram 1500 trucks are 66" 65" and 67" respectively. Minus 5 or 6 inches on either side from the wheel center to the inside edge of the rubber wheel, and you get the inside dimension within an inch or two of 56"… Which is 4ft, 8in…
Which to me implies the wheel track dimension for full size vehicles is also closely related to the prior Roman standard.
Or you can come to sunny Southern California and take a 15-minute ride on a D&RG narrow-gauge train at Knott’s Berry Farm. They also have a Galloping Goose.
Man, did your post bring back memories. My Dad took us to Silverton and Durango a lot. While we never rode the train, we saw it several times.
Use twentieth-century technology to learn about nineteenth-century trains: http://www.durangotrain.com/ During the winter, the train only goes half-way to Silverton, then returns to Durango, because of the snow. But, from May to October, they go all the way to Silverton and back. Roundtrip tickets for adults are $53 per adult, $27 per child under age 12. Parlor car service, with a bar, available only to adults 21 or older, is $88.
BTW, the reason for narrow-gauge trains was simple: Narrow right-of-ways meant narrower tunnels and ledges on high mountains. They were cheaper and faster to construct.
>< DARWIN >
__L___L
OK, I’m going from memory here, so take this with the requisite grains of salt…
I recall reading that in the early days of the US railroad industry, several different gauges competed from supremacy. When freight had to be carried over lines of different gauge, cars had to be lifted off their wheels and placed on new carriages to run over the next set of tracks. This employed a lot of unskilled labor, and was of course quite expensive and time consuming. When the feds put an end to the practice by declaring a standard gauge, the yard workers in some town rioted and the Prez (Lincoln?) had to send in the troops.
After the change, there was the story of the president of a tiny railroad writing to one of the big conglomerates and saying “My railroad may not be as big as yours, but it’s just as wide…”
“The dawn of a new era is felt and not measured.” Walter Lord
Oh, and there are many still-operating narrow-gauge trains and attendant museums all across the USA, literally from Maine to California. A Metacrawler search turned up 48 hits, though some of these “hits” are on more than one website.
The Encyclopedia Britannica confirms Cecil’s claim that the standard gauge was derived by George Stephenson, but it does NOT say how he decided it would be 4’, 8 1/2", which is also 1.435 meters. (About 60% of the world’s railways are standard gauge.) It also points out that a narrow gauge does save space, and also allows for tighter turns, also useful when laying out tracks in the mountains. Smaller rolling stock is also cheaper and faster to construct and maintain. Unfortunately, you sacrifice speed and stability, but who wants to go at high speeds on a narrow mountain ledge or through tunnels? www.britannica.com/bcom/eb/article/9/0,5716,120019+3,00.html
ALSO: www.britannica.com/bcom/eb/article/idxref/9/0,5716,527899,00.html
Cecil may want to mention “The Battle of the Gauges.” Isambard Kingdom Brunel (What a name!) designed the first transatlantic steamer and supervised a tunnel underneath the Thames in London till an accident injured him in 1828. He designed a 7-foot gauge railway, the broader gauge making higher speeds possible. www.britannica.com/bcom/eb/article/2/0,5716,17022+1,00.html The broad gauge is not in, ahem, wide use, however. Today, though Brunel is better known for designing three of the world’s largest 18th-century steamships.
>< DARWIN >
__L___L
Cecil made the funny papers…
I received the following “joke” in my email this morning:
The Corporate Mind
Here is a look into the corporate mind that is very interesting, educational, historical, completely true, and hysterical all at the same time:
The US standard railroad gauge (width between the two 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 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 in the roads? Roman war chariots first formed the initial ruts, which everyone else had to match for fear of destroying their wagon wheels. Since the chariots were made for (or by) Imperial Rome, they were all alike in the matter of wheel spacing. 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 what horse’s ass 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. Thus, we have the answer to the original question.
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. The SRBs are made by Thiokol at their 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 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 over two thousand years ago by the width of a Horse’s Ass!
Make that 19th Century. :o
When all else fails, ask Cecil.