ok all and now we know a piece of trivia i am sure we will never need to know!!












Subject: Railroads and Rocket Science










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 army

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!


























"Experience is that marvellous thing that enables you
to recognize a mistake when you make it again."
-- Franklin P. Jones







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