wojtek
>Here is a look into the corporate mind that is very interesting,
>educational, historical, completely true, and hysterical all at the same
>time:
>
>The US standard railroad gauge (width between the two 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 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, long distance 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
>Europe (and England) were built by Imperial Rome for their legions. The
>roads have been used ever since. And the ruts in the roads? Roman war
>chariots first formed the initial ruts, which everyone else had to match
>for fear of destroying their wagon wheels. Since the chariots were made
>for (or by) Imperial Rome, they were all alike in the matter of wheel
>spacing.
>
>The United States standard railroad gauge of 4 feet, 8.5 inches derives
>from the original specification for an Imperial Roman war chariot.
>Specifications 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. Thus,
>we have the answer to the original question.
>
>Now the twist to the story..............
>
>There's an interesting extension to the story about railroad gauges and
>horses' behinds. 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 had 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
>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!
>