Did you know this????

interurban

Active Member
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 built 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 used for building
> wagons,
> which used that wheel spacing. Okay! 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 United States 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, or SRBs. The 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. 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
:D :D :D :D :D :D :rolleyes: :rolleyes:
 

Livesteam

Member
4 feet 8.5 inches, thats it, just need to get some long axels and put them on an HO,G,S,O,N or z scale engine and than you can say i have a real scale train.
 

Matthyro

Will always be re-membered
It is amazing how accepted many of the things we know and do without thinking of the historical reasons.
 
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