A Horse's Ass IS Important
Why is the U.S. Standard Railroad Gauge 4 feet, 8.5 inches?
[Does the statement,
“We've always done it that way”
ring any bells? The U.S. standard railroad gauge (distance between the rails) is
4 feet, 8.5 inches. That's an odd number, don't you think? Why was that gauge
used?]
- Because that's the way they built railroads in England, and English
expatriates built the U.S. 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 used for building wagons, which used that wheel spacing. Then 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 (and England) for
their legions. The 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. The U.S.
standard railroad gauge of 4 feet, 8.5 inches is derived from the original
specifications for an Imperial Roman war chariot 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...
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 (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. 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 two thousand
years ago by the width of a horse's ass.
And you thought being a Horse's Ass wasn't important...