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Fwd: Fw: Who'da thought?

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-----Original Message-----
From: Donald Reichert <bevdon@earthlink.net>
To: Harry Pender <hpender@wizard.com>
Date: Thursday, January 13, 2000 6:38 PM
Subject: Fw: Who'da thought?

 
  ; 
Sent: Wednesday, January 12, 2000 9:23 AM
Subject: Who'da thought?

The US standard railroad gauge (distance between the rails) is 4 feet,
8.5 inches. That's a pretty odd number.

Why was that gauge used? Because that's the way they built them in
England, and the 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 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 roads in England, because that's the spacing of the wheel ruts.

So who built those old rutted roads? The first long distance roads in
England and in much of Europe were built by Imperial Rome for their legions. The roads have been used ever since.

And the ruts in the roads? The initial ruts, which everyone else had to
match for fear of destroying their wagon wheels, were first formed by Roman war
chariots. Since the chariots were made by Imperial Rome, they were all alike in
wheel spacing. So the US standard railroad gauge of 4 feet, 8.5 inches
derives from the original specification for an Imperial Roman war chariot.

And the Imperial Roman war chariots? They were made just wide enough to
accommodate the back ends of two war horses.

Thus, we have the answer to the original question but with a final
twist..............
when we 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 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 from the factory runs 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 is about as wide as two horses' behinds.

So, the major 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!



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