Ever wonder...

[Doug Davis <du...@us.ibm.com>]

Don't have any idea if any other this is true, but...  8-)
-Dug

> Ever Wonder Why?...
>
> 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 extraterrestrial 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. 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 hipped 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.
>
>
>
> And you wonder why it's so hard to get ahead in this world...