Strange BUT TRUE…“Very Scary”
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. 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
spacing? Well, if they tried to use any other spacing the wagons would
breaks 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 then. 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 questions. 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. When we see the Space
Shuttle
sitting on the launch pad, here 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 the 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 horse’s
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.
And the question to ponder I guess is, how much of your workload is
determined by a horse’s—?