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palsaniya
January 18th, 2004, 02:49 PM
Does the statement, "We've always done it that way"
ring any bells?.. .

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 war
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 atunnel 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.



@@@@@@@@@@@@@@
ram

rkumar
January 18th, 2004, 04:56 PM
really interesting...

Rajendra