This is very amusing, but after you have read and enjoyed this, try this
site:?
http://www.spikesys.com/Trains/st_gauge.html
Jim
Begin forwarded message:
> *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.
>
> *
>
>
>
> *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?
>
> *
>
> *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.
> The United States standard railroad gauge of 4 feet, 8.5 inches is
> derived from the
> original specifications for an Imperial Roman war chariot. 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 army*
>
> *chariots were made just wide enough to accommodate the back ends of
> two war horses!*
> 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 SRBs.
> The SRBs are made by Thiokol at their factory at Utah . The engineers
> who designed the ?SRBs would 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 happens 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, 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!*
__,_._,___
-- ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Ana Marjanovic'-Shane,Ph.D.151 W. Tulpehocken St.
Philadelphia, PA 19144
Home office: (215) 843-2909
Mobile: (267) 334-2905
ana@zmajcenter.org <mailto:ana@zmajcenter.org>
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