Trains, Wagons and Space Shuttles !

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 designed 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 had  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?
Imperial    Rome built the first long distance  roads in  Europe (including   England ) for  their legions. Those  roads have been used ever since.


And  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 alike in the matter of wheel  spacing.  Therefore  the United States standard railroad  gauge of  4 feet, 8.5 inches is derived from the original specifications  for an Imperial Roman war chariot.



Bureaucracies  live forever.

So  the next time you are handed  a specification/procedure/process  and wonder 'What  horse's ass came up with  this?' you  may be exactly right. Imperial  Roman army  chariots were made just wide  enough to  accommodate the rear ends  of two  war horses. 

Now,  the twist to the  story

When  you 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, which are made by Thiokol at their factory in Utah.


The  engineers who designed the  SRBs would  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 happens  to run through a tunnel in  the mountains,  and the SRBs had to fit  through that  tunnel.  The tunnel is slightly wider  than the  railroad track, and the railroad  track, as  you now know, is about as  wide as  two horses' behinds.

So,  a major Space Shuttle design  feature of  what is arguably the world's  most advanced  transportation system was  determined over 2,000 years  ago by  the width of a horse's  ass. And  you thought being a horse's  ass wasn't  important?
Horse's  asses control just about  everything!!




Source: circulated emails.