TOPIC: Railroads

Railroad  tracks.

I do not know if this is true, but I liked it.


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 made just wide enough to accommodate the  rear ends of two war horses. (Two horse's 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 to 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 wider 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.

Yeah I've seen this one before.  I thought it was pretty interesting.

www.snopes.com/history/american/gauge.asp

Looks like it's partially true.

That's pretty interesting.  Didn't have time to read the whole thing though.