[DL]

["Bill Hein" <darkchil@rea-alp.com>]

If you have seen this one before - be sure to check out the new twist at the
end...

The U.S. standard railroad gauge (distance between the rails) is 4 feet, 8.5
inches. That is an exceptionally 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 that way?

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.  So why did
the wagons have that particular odd 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?

The ruts in the roads, which everyone 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 all 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 end 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 it's launching pad, there are two
booster rockets attached to the side 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 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................

Don't you just love engineering?

Darkechilde
darkchil@rea-alp.com
ICQ#12901136
MSMessenger Darkechilde13@hotmail.com
AOLIM
www.bill-hein.com