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RAILROAD TRACKS

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.

Lordhat, thank you.
That is a fun story

And that is why Engineers should be careful with their specifications.

I knew that already. QI is your friend!

What exactly is QI?

Nice story, was interesting and informative. I just wish they still had a large number of relatively cheap railways.

Nice story,maybe we here on Daka should start up our own,Bureau of Miscellaneous information.Or B.O.M.I. for short.

Lordhat wrote:What exactly is QI?

It's an English show, QI stands for quite ignorant. Basically they get celebrities on and ask them questions, penalising them if they give the boring, predictable answer (because much of the show is based on things you thought you knew but were in fact way off the mark). For instance, if you were asked what the largest living thing in the world is and you answered the blue whale, you'd lose points and people would make fun of you, because there is in fact an underground fungal thing growing in the US that is absolutely ridiculously big, it's spread across acres and acres.

It's part info show and part comedy, and hosted by Stephen Fry, who you might know from Blackadder, or as the gay TV show host in V for Vendetta.


Cheers for the story, by the way. It was really cool.

It's Quite Interesting.

The US and Uk uses a guage called standard guage which was adopted in the Uk by act of parlaiment in 1846. Some nations have wider guages, such as ireland, which had a wider more stavble guage accepted in the same act.

The US adopted English guage, for reasons best known to themselves, as because they didnt have the old road structure to modify they could have chosen a wider more stable guage. From what i gather the US was on better speaking terms with the continent at the time anyway and should have adopted at least continental guage, if not wider.

As for the boosters they should have manufactured components and assembled them offsite. Then you can have your wider booster. I think boosters are the shape they are because they are a direct copy of ICBM technology, which comes out of a hole in the ground, or in some cases submarine, which is designed quite independently of the width of horses and as narrow as conveniently possible.

The Dreadnote wrote:It's Quite Interesting.

Gyaargh that was a silly error. Goes to show I need to go back and watch more QI, think the last I saw was about half way through the E series.