Thread: Railroad Tracks

You might start reading and say I know the answer but keep reading if you want to smile by learning the rest of the story!





The U.S. 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 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 tram ways 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.

In other words, bureaucracies live forever.

So the next time you are handed a specification, procedure, or 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, you will notice that 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 in Utah.



The engineers who designed the SRBs would have preferred to make them a bit larger, 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 two thousand years ago by the width of a horse's ass.

And you thought being a horse's ass wasn't important!

Now you know, Horses' Asses control almost everything.
Explains a whole lot of stuff, doesn't it

Originally Posted by bob10

The rolling stock was wider.

Probably because it could be -where early railways in the UK meant buying access to relatively expensive land in a relatively densely populated countryside, the US in the first half of the nineteenth century and where the early railways were built was nowhere near as densely populated, so the cost of land was a much smaller factor. And the key to the loading gauge was the with of the reservation where two tracks were needed.

A further factor was probably that the early US railways were built on a shoestring compared to the UK, and avoided earthworks like the plague, and especially tunnels. By the time railways were built that needed these, the loading gauge had already been established. In contrast, even the first public railway, the Liverpool and Manchester Railway of 1830 (Stephenson, UK), was dual track, involved tunnels, cuttings and a number of bridges, both on the railway and across it, as well as extending into the built-up areas of two major cities.