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Ever wonder how they came up with some of the odd dimensions used in our
LBC??
Just read on....
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 US railroads
were built by English expatriates.
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 had used for building wagons, which used
that wheel spacing.
Okay! Why did the wagons use that odd wheel
spacing? Well, if they tried to use any other spacing the wagons
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 roads have been used ever since.
And the ruts? The initial ruts, which everyone else had to match
for fear of destroying their wagons, were first made by Roman war
chariots. Since the chariots were made for or by Imperial Rome,
they were all alike. In the matter of wheel spacing.
And thus, we have the answer to the original question.
The United States standard railroad gauge of 4 feet, 8.5 inches
derives from the original specification
for an Imperial Roman army war chariot.
Specs 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.
Now the twist to the story....
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 line
to the factory runs through a tunnel in the mountains. And 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 determined by the width.
. . . . . of a horse's ass.
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