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Pooh-Bah
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Pooh-Bah
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It is some while since I first saw this one, and had totally forgotten it - my apologies to any of you who are familiar with it, but if you haven't seen it before it makes an interesting read -
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 and so 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.
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Joined: Sep 2000
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Sep 2000
Posts: 4,757 |
A historic yart, indeed: one that set legal precedents… Sparteye: Doesn't it figure that my first post would occur in a thread called Horses's asses?http://wordsmith.org/board/showflat.pl?Cat=&Board=miscellany&Number=1315(which doesn't in the slightest make it not worth bringing up again for new members!)
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veteran
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veteran
Joined: Oct 2000
Posts: 1,346 |
Sparteye: Doesn't it figure that my first post would occur in a thread called Horses's asses?
http://wordsmith.org/board/showflat.pl?Cat=&Board=miscellany&Number=1315
Bum link, mav, sorry!
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Joined: Sep 2000
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Sep 2000
Posts: 4,757 |
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Joined: Sep 2000
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Sep 2000
Posts: 4,757 |
(but there again, as Jo put it....)
Hasn't backward compatibility always been a problem?
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Joined: Mar 2001
Posts: 4,189
Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Mar 2001
Posts: 4,189 |
Well, if it weren't for horse manure, then the farmers would be sh*t out of luck! 
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Joined: Aug 2001
Posts: 10,535 Likes: 1
Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Aug 2001
Posts: 10,535 Likes: 1 |
It is some while since I first saw this one, and had totally forgotten it Not to puncture the balloon - it's so charming we _want_ it to be true - but, sadly, it isn't. http://www.straightdope.com/columns/000218.htmlhas a nice llittle debunking, and so does Stales.com but unfortunately I don't have the URL handy at the moment... EDIT: it's Snopes.com, of course. Silly me. Sorry, Stales; take it as a compliment. The full URL is http://www.snopes2.com/history/american/gauge.htm
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stranger
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stranger
Joined: Jul 2002
Posts: 9 |
to rhubarb commando:
You account of railroad gauge is a further copy of text that appears verbatim many times on the net, such as http://www.gomilpitas.com/homeschooling/humor/035.htm.
It is not necessarily entirely accurate, though. Some further reports, among many, are:
http://www.snopes2.com/history/american/gauge.htm (urban legends)
http://www.straightdope.com/columns/000218.html (straight dope)
http://www.scsra.org/library/milspec-debunk.html (from a historian of railroad engineering)
US railroad gauge was in fact highly NON-standardized until after the Civil War here. (Particularly in the south, thus hindering the South in that war.) The problem was so extreme that freight-cars were built with special trucks (the wheel assmebly) that could run on either of two gauges.
Even today, numerous gauges are in use in various parts of the world. On a quick look: "Some major rail systems use wider gauge (India uses 5˝', Russia uses 5') and others use narrower (portions of Africa, Brazil, Japan, and Australia use gauges of around 3˝')."
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Pooh-Bah
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OP
Pooh-Bah
Joined: Aug 2000
Posts: 2,204 |
My goodness, armor - if I had thought for one minute that the story was true i wouldn't have given it a moment's thought.  And certainly would *not have posted it in this forum, where it would, very properly, have been panned as boring. It is the sheer speciousness of the reasoning, the absolute effrontery of whoever promulgated it in making such an elegant attempt to fool people, that attracts me. Incidentally, there was no attempt at standardisation of British railway gauges until 1846 and, even then, the Great Western Railway continued to use the broad gauge until 1896.
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Joined: Oct 2000
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veteran
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veteran
Joined: Oct 2000
Posts: 1,346 |
It is the sheer speciousness of the reasoning, the absolute effrontery of whoever promulgated it in making such an elegant attempt to fool people, that attracts me.The shame, the shame!  How can we ever trust you again, Rhuby? You think our tremendous faith in your academic credentials is merely something to be toyed with, don't you?  I'll bet you haven't even got that Oxford doctorate you keep going on about. Humph and humph again.  
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