That's the way we've always done it!

[CadNazi]

We've always done it that way" 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 use 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?

[hitme101]

Interesting;) Never thought about those things.

[RV'er]

TRADITION EXTENDING BACK TO ROMAN CHARIOTS-Fiction!

This is one of those alleged bits of history that is written so convincingly that it's
hard to tell whether it's valid. There is no truth to it, however. The moral of the
message is that a lot of things in our lives are the result of traditions that
nobody has ever questioned. The eRumor claims that the width of our train
rails (4' 8 1/2") is based on the width of rails for English trains, which is based
on the width of ancient ruts in the roads of England, which is based on the
width of Roman chariot wheels. The railroad historians agree that the width
comes from an English train pioneer who created the first train steam engine.
By the time the British got serious about railroads, there were already more
than 1,000 miles of his tracks so his width of the rails became the standard.
That also became the U.S. standard. There is no evidence any of that was the
result of road ruts or Roman chariots, however. Most ancient road ruts in
Great Britain, according to those who know, were from hand carts, not chariots.
Also, chariots were not used that much on public roads and by the time the
British railroads came onto the scene, the Romans had been gone for 1,200
years. There also seems to be some evidence that none of the widths, not the
road ruts or the train rails, is the same as the width of Roman chariot wheels.

For more details, go to:
<http://www.truthorfiction.com/rumors/railwidth.htm>
:eek: :eek: :gg