- Railroad tracks...
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- The US standard railroad gauge (distance between the
rails) is 4 feet, 8.5 inches. That's an exceedingly odd number.
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- Why was that gauge used? Because that's the way they
built them in England, and English expatriates built the US railroads.
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- Why did the English build them like that? Because the
first rail lines were</ B> built by the same people who built the
pre-railroad tramways, and that's the gauge they used.
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- 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.
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- Why did the wagons have that particular odd wheel spacing?
Well, if they tried to u se 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- So the next time you are handed a Specification/ Procedure/Process
and wonder 'What horse's ass came up with it?' you may be exactly right.
Imperial Roman army chariots were made just wide enough to accommodate
the rear ends of two war horses. (Two horses' asses.) Now, the twist to
the story:
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- 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 bo osters, or SRBs. The SRBs 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.
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- 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 horse's ass. And you thought being
a horse's ass wasn't important? Ancient horse's asses control almost
everything....and CURRENT Horses Asses are controlling everything else!
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