OT: RR gauge

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 designed 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 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 Statesstandard railroad gauge of 4 feet, 8.5 inches is derived from the original specifications for an Imperial Roman war chariot. Bureaucracies live forever.

So the next time you are handed a specification/procedure/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. (Two horses' asses.)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 in 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 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? Ancient horse's asses control almost everything... and

CURRENT Horses Asses in Washington are controlling everything else

Reply to
Karl Townsend
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Nice story and I thinks it has been on here before and Snopes has comment on as being untrue IIRC. Some countries do have differing gauges but not by much. IIRC Spain has a slightly narrower gauge and they do some weird stuff like swap the bogeys at the boarder. I think Australia has an odd selection of widths also, for some reason. My neighbour and another mate know more about it but I'm not going to ask right now.

Reply to
David Billington

The Snopes comment

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, actually I was wrong they didn't list it as untrue.

The comment about the narrow tunnel and Thiokol reminds me of seeing drawings my neighbour has of a locomotive he has modelled and the loading gauge of various companies that ran that engine, some are very tight to the engine outline, particularly the cab, leaving only inches to spare. I live about a mile from a section of railway that was built by Brunel originally in 7' broad gauge and that was built with a huge loading gauge compared to many at the time. Brunel has the foresite to see the potential of moving large items by rail but lost out in the end. Some of the local tunnels dwarf the locomotives that pass through them. One of the problems left by inventing the rail technology, we're left living with much of the original infrastructure still.

Reply to
David Billington

Do you think the Roman Empire ended in the 5th century? I don't think so, it moved north and west from Rome into Aachen and eventually became the Holy Roman Empire in the 9th century and then it stayed around Europe until the 18th century and then it moved to the Americas. We are the latest reincarnation of the Roman Empire...

cheer T.Alan

Reply to
T.Alan Kraus

Do you think the Roman Empire ended in the 5th century? I don't think so, it moved north and west from Rome into Aachen and eventually became the Holy Roman Empire in the 9th century and then it stayed around Europe until the 18th century and then it moved to the Americas. We are the latest reincarnation of the Roman Empire...

cheers T.Alan

Reply to
T.Alan Kraus

Un, could you please post that again. I missed it the first two times ............

Reply to
Steve B

Well, the rail cars were sized to haul bales of cotton, and prior to that there were a lot of different US 'Standards' that required that cargo be moved from one train to another. From what I read years ago, that spacing was the closest 'standard' to what was needed for cargo trains, and the easiest to convert all other train cars to use.

Reply to
Michael A. Terrell

The different size rail gauges in the south during the civil war were a problem for the army moving supplies. This was the first war that railroads were an important part of logistics. On some tracks they just laid another rail along side of the existing ones. The Erie railroad used a five foot gauge until it was decided to standardize the gauge in the US. There are still a couple of narrow gauge tracks in use. I think the DRGW (Denver and Rio Grande) is one of them.

John

Reply to
john

Used to be CO had more narrow gauge track than anyplace else, they replaced mules and ox trains hauling stuff in and out of the mining districts. There's still four or five lines running for the tourist business, most of the rest was either abandoned or the rights of way reused for highways. Smallest I've seen was 1 foot gauge, almost model steamer-sized stuff. Was at a mine, though, not general freight hauling.

Germans had the same problem using Russian rails. Russian railroad gauge was(is?) wider than what was European standard, so stuff either had to be transhipped at the border or an extra rail tacked down inside the tracks in captured areas. Put a real bottleneck in advances, which was the point.

Stan

Reply to
stans4

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