ian77
Posts: 627
Joined: 4/27/2004
From: Scotland
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quote:
ORIGINAL: Apollo11
Hi all,
Just before I leave... is thts true or false (i.e. hoax)... 
quote:
The Space Shuttle and the Horse's Rear End
Say friend, did you know that the US Standard railroad gauge (distance between the rails) is 4 feet, 8 1/2 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.
I see, but why did the English build them like that?
Because the first railway lines were built by the same people who built the pre-railroad tramways, and that's the gauge they used.
Well, why did they use that gauge in England?
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 their wagons use that odd wheel spacing?
Because, if they tried to use any other spacing the wagon wheels would break 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 Roman roads have been used ever since.
And the ruts?
The original ruts, which everyone else had to match for fear of destroying their wagons, were first made by the wheels of 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 question. The United States standard railroad gauge of 4 feet, 8 1/2 inches derives from the original specification for an Imperial Roman army war chariot.
And the motto of the story is 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 chariots were made to be just wide enough to accommodate the back-ends of two war-horses.
So, just what does this have to do with the exploration of space?
Well, there's an interesting extension of the story about railroad gauge and horses' behinds. When we see a Space Shuttle sitting on the launch pad, there 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 a 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 from 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 horses' behinds.
So a major design feature of what is arguably the world's most advanced transportation system was originally determined by the width of a horse's ass.
Leo "Apollo11"
AFAIK The Romans did not have "war chariots".
It is rather inaccurate to claim that "US railroads were built by English expatriates," but it is fair to say that since the British started to develop railroads slightly ahead of the Americans,some U.S. railroads used equipment purchased from English manufacturers, thus necessitating that the rails on which that equipment ran be the same size in both countries.
England, the innovator in railroad technology, enjoyed an early head start over America. When New Jersey sponsored a rail and canal connection between New York and Philadelphia in 1831, they ordered a custom-built locomotive from an English company - the John Bull. The railroad became an immediate success, carrying over 100,000 passengers in 1834.
And once the Americans caught up, they began selling railway technology back to England, further establishing a similarity of equipment (and hence track size) between the two countries. American companies emulated and improved upon the English designs. By 1841, ten American locomotive manufacuters had sprung into existence and they produced 375 of the 500 engines in the United States.Those shops soon began changing the English designs, making the engines more powerful and the rails cheaper, bettersuited to the rough conditions in the United States. The American shops even exported their engines, and these overseas customers naturally included Britain, and other countries who had previously purchased equipment from Britain, further "standardising" the existing British gauge.
Nonetheless, despite this commonality of equipment, well into the 19th century the U.S. did not have one "standard" railroad gauge. At the time of the Civil War, even though nearly all of the Confederacy's railroad equipment had come from the North or from Britain (of the 470 locomotives built in the U.S. in 1860, for example, only 19 were manufactured in the South, 113 different railroad companies in the Confederacy operated on three different gauges of track. This lack of standardization was, as historian James McPherson points out, one of the many reasons the Union was able to finally vanquish the Confederacy militarily:
"The Confederate government was never able to coax the fragmented, run-down, multi-gauged network of southern railroads into the same degree of efficiency exhibited by northern roads. This contrast illustrated another dimension of Union logistical superiority that helped the North eventually to prevail."
The eventual standardization of railroad gauge in the U.S. was due far less to a slavish devotion to a gauge inherited from England than to the simple fact that the North won the Civil War and, in the process, rebuilt much of the Southern railway system to match its own.
In other words, there was nothing inevitable about a railroad gauge supposedly traceable to the size of wheel ruts in Imperial Rome. Had the Civil War taken a different course, the eventual standard railroad gauge used throughout North America might well have been different than the current one.
Hope this helps you to decide if it is fact or fiction... 
< Message edited by ian77 -- 1/12/2010 11:33:24 PM >
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