Railroad Tracks

This is
both interesting and 'funny'??
Bet no one ever heard
of this one??


Railroad
tracks. This is
fascinating.



Be sure to read
the final paragraph; your understanding
of it will depend on
the earlier part of the
content.


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 States
standard 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 *** 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 ***. And
you thought being a horse's ***
wasn't important?
Ancient horse's asses control
almost everything...
and


CURRENT Horses Asses
are controlling everything
else!