Extra Board
Little bit of trivia
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? The first long distance roads in 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...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. Thiokol makes the SRBs 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
Waiting for the Train
