Only Tom’s engineer friends will appreciate this story:
\nRAILROADS<\/i>
\nDoes the statement, “We’ve always done it like that” ring any bells? Read this email to the end; this is a new one for me
\nThe 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 built the US Railroads.
\nWhy did the English build them like that?
\nBecause the first rail lines were built by the same people who built the pre-railroad tramways, and that’s the gauge they used.
\nWhy did “they” use that gauge then?
\nBecause the people who built the tramways used the same jigs and tools that they used for building wagons, which used that wheel spacing.
\nOkay! Why did the wagons have that particular odd wheel spacing?
\nWell, 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.
\nSo who built those old rutted roads?
\nImperial Rome built the first long distance roads in Europe (and England) for their legions. The roads have been used ever since.
\nAnd the ruts in the roads?
\nRoman 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.
\nThe United States standard railroad gauge of 4 feet, 8.5 inches is therefore derived from the original specifications for an Imperial Roman war chariot. And bureaucracies live forever.
\nSo 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 army chariots were made just wide enough to accommodate the back ends of two war horses!
\nNow, the twist to the story
\nWhen 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.
\nThe SRBs are made by Thiokol at their factory at 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.
\nThe railroad line from the factory happens to run through a tunnel in the mountains.
\nThe SRBs had to fit through that tunnel.
\nThe tunnel is slightly wider than the railroad track, and the railroad track, as you now know, is about as wide as two horses’ behinds.
\nSo, 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 horse’s ass.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Only Tom’s engineer friends will appreciate this story: RAILROADS Does the statement, “We’ve always done it like that” ring any bells? Read this email to the end; this is a new one for me The US standard railroad gauge (distance between the rails) is 4 feet, 8.5 inches. That’s an exceedingly odd number. Why was […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-142","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/paynecentral.com\/tompayne\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/142"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/paynecentral.com\/tompayne\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/paynecentral.com\/tompayne\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/paynecentral.com\/tompayne\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/paynecentral.com\/tompayne\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=142"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/paynecentral.com\/tompayne\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/142\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/paynecentral.com\/tompayne\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=142"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/paynecentral.com\/tompayne\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=142"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/paynecentral.com\/tompayne\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=142"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}