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Straight
Track #21
Railroad Logic
Hoey & Farina
1-888-425-1212
info@felahfd.com
If you've ever wondered…
The U.S. standard railroad gauge (distance between
the rails) is 4 feet, 8.5inches. That's an exceedingly odd number. Why was
that gauge used? Because that's the way they built them in England, and
the U.S. 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-rail-road
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, those 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 its 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 for (or
by) Imperial Rome, they were alike in the matter of wheel spacing.
The U.S. 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 SRB's. The
SRB's are made by Thiokol at their factory in Utah.
The engineers who designed the SRB's might have
preferred to make them a bit fatter, but the SRB's 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 SRB's 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. Therefore,
the major design feature of what is arguably the world's most advanced
transportation system was determined over 2,00O years ago, by the width of
a Horse's Ass!
Which makes for a kind of nice bedtime story.
(Excerpt from the National Review/January 24, 2000)
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