[StBernard] Railroad Gauge

[Westley Annis]

I have no idea whether this is true or not but sounds interesting...




	
	
	
	 




		 Read on......unbelievable
		
		Be sure to read the final paragraph, but your understanding 
		of it will depend on the earlier part of the content. This
is 
		amazing and very funny. . . .as well as true.
		
		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 horses' 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 SRBs. The
SRBs 
		are made by Thiokol at their factory in 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, and 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? 
		 
		Ancient horse's asses control almost everything....
		 
		and CURRENT Horses Asses