Good Morning to my wonderful Cyberfriends here in Tims' Kingdom.
I do not have much time this week because it is my birthday on the 18th and old friends and I are getting together for overdue visits.
I will answer your PMs soom. I also have to read each post since last Tues.
Tim and Jas, the two of you have really hit on something that you have no idea how much affect it had on us. <<GG>>
Horses Asses. They deserve some respect from us. <s> Be careful what you say about them and read the following. I ran across it on another thread.
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For the scientific, engineering, or inquiring mind:
The US Standard railroad gauge (distance between the rails) is 4'
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 the US railroads were built by English expatriates.
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? The first long distance roads in Europe were
built by Imperial Rome for the benefit of their legions. The roads have
been used ever since.
And the ruts? The initial ruts, which everyone else had to match for fear
of destroying their wagons, were first made by Roman war chariots. 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
ass came up with it, you may be exactly right. Because the Imperial Roman
chariots were made to be just wide enough to accommodate the back ends 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. The SRBs are made by Thiokol 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 Ass!
I only popped on for a second and I wish everyone a wonderful weekend.
Still holding my CS and PIOS tight.
Pat
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