Track Gauge

[edblysard]

Cute story..
The Romans must have had alwful skinny horses then...
I had a pair of Appaloosas, from the same foaling, (rare, but horse twins do happen), one is 15 hands, the other 14.5...side by side their fannys are way bigger across than the guage of the tracks!

Sorta like my sister in laws...you need to mount turn signals on em when they walk side by side....

Ed[:D]

[Anonymous]

That story has been around for quite a while. I actually got a zerox of it in a biology class I took when I was going to school some time ago - a place that has nothing to do with trains.

[Anonymous]

So in effect, what you're saying to me is this was wayyy too old to post here ... like everyone and their mom seen it. (sigh) It's tough to conversate in something I really have a passion for, especially when I haven't much knowledge.

A year ago I thought "ALCO" was dog food and a "boxcar" was Mike Tyson's automobile. It took quite awhile for me to realize "DINA" wasn't some fancy railside restaurant. A "spike" is not just the name a railroad worker gives to his dog. And a wig wag signal is not what spike does with his tail when a fresh can of ALCO is opened.

[Anonymous]

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 people 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 use that odd wheel spacing? Well, if they tried to use any other spacing the wagons would break on some of the old, long distance roads, because that's the spacing of the old wheel ruts. So who built these old rutted roads? Imperial Rome for the benefit of their legions built the first long distance roads in Europe. The roads have been used ever since. And the ruts? Roman war chariots first made the initial ruts, which everyone else had to match for fear of destroying their wagons. Since the chariots were made for or by Imperial Rome they were all alike in the matter of wheel spacing. Thus, we have the answer to the original question. The United States standard railroad gauge of 4 feet, 8.5 inches derives from the original specification for an Imperial Roman army war chariot.

Specs and Bureaucracies live forever.

So, the next time you are handed a specification and wonder what horse's *** came up with it, you may be exactly right. Because the Imperial Roman chariots were made to be just wide enough to accommodate the backends of two war-horses.

Now the twist to the story.... There's an interesting extension of the story about railroad gauge and horses' behinds. When we see a Space Shuttle sitting on the launch pad, there are two big booster rockets attached to the sides of the main fuel tank. These are the solid rocket boosters, or SRBs. Thiokol makes the SRBs at a factory in Utah. The engineers who designed the SRBs might 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 to the factory runs through a tunnel in the mountains. The SRBs had to fit through that tunnel. The tunnel is slightly wider than a railroad track, and the railroad track is about as wide as two horses' behinds. So a major design feature of what is arguably the world's most advanced transportation system was determined by the width of a horse's behind!