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Posted by Alan Morton The U.S. 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 our U.S. 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. Okay! So 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? Imperial Rome built the first long distance roads in Europe (and England) for their legions. The roads have been used ever since. And why the ruts in the roads? Roman war chariots formed the initial ruts, which everyone else had to match for fear of destroying their wagon wheels. Since the chariots were made for Imperial Rome, they were all standardized in the matter of wheel spacing. THe United States standard gauge of 4 feet, 8,5 inches is derived from the original specifications for an Imperial Rome war chariot. And the bureaucracies live forever. So the next time you are handed a specification and wonder what horse's --s came up with it, you may be exactly right, because the Imperial Roman army war chariots were made just wide enough to accommodate the rear end of a war horse! Now, for the twist to the story! When you see a Space Shuttle sitting on its launch pad, there are two big white colored booster solid rockets attached to the sides of the monstrous orange colored main fuel tank. These are solid rocket boosters, or SRB's. The SRB's are manufactured by Morton Thiokol at their plant in Utah. The engineers would have preferred to make them a bit fatter, but alas the SRB's had to be shipped by train from the factory to the launch site in Florida. The rail line from the factory happens to run through a tunnel in the mountains. The SRB's had to fit through the tunnel. The tunnel is slightly wider than the railroad track, and the railroad track as you know is about as wide as a horse's rear end. So, a major Space Shuttle 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 Imperial Roman war horse's rear end!
on 5/14/2007, 6:34 pm
75.83.113.51
The following appeared in the Santa Ana CADET, Santa Ana Army Air Base newsletter, dated April 2007. Rewritten herein, with approval of Editor Art Lambert.
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