Subject: The test of time
More appropriate, good engineering can live long after you. What good
engineering works have you done recently?
ENGINEERS TAKE NOTE,THE EVIL YOU DO LIVES AFTER YOU.
>
> The US Standard railroad gauge (distance between the rails) is 4 feet 8.5
inches. That is an exceedingly odd number. Why was that gauge used? Because
that is the way they build railroads 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 that 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 use that odd wheel spacing? Well if they tried to
use any other spacing the wagons would break on some of the old long distance
roads, because that's the spacing of the old wheel ruts.
> So who built these old rutted roads? The first long distance roads in Europe
were built by Imperial Rome for the benefit of their legions. The roads have
been used ever since.
> And the ruts? The initial ruts that all had to match for fear of breaking
their wagons were made by Roman war chariots. Since the charoits were made for
or by Imperial Rome, they were all alike in the matter of wheel spacing.
> So the US railroad gauge of 4 feet 8.5 inches derives from the original
specification of an Imperial Roman war chariot. Specs 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. The Roman chariots were made to
be just wide enough to accommadate the backends of two war horses.
> Now the twist to the story. There is an interesting extension of the story
about railroad gauge and horses behinds.
>
> When you see a space shuttle sitting on the launch pad, there are two big
booster rockets attached to the main stage shuttle. These are solid rocket
boosters(SRB's). The SRB's are made by Thiokol at a factory in Utah. The
engineers who designed these SRB's might have preferred to make them fatter,
but
the SRB's had to be shipped by train to the launch site. The railroad line
from
the factory runs through a tunnel in the mountains. The SRB's had to fit
through
that tunnel. The tunnel is slightly wider than a railroad track, and the
railroad track is about as wide as two horses behinds.
>
> So the major design feature of what is arguably the worlds most advanced
transportation system was deternimed by the width of a horse's ass!
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