RE: Railroad tracks and space technology or how your specifications will live forever

Nice one



From the Desk of :
Vijosh A. 
Systems & Software
SEEPZ, Bombay, INDIA.
Email : <vijosha@alfuttaim.co.ae <mailto:vijosha@alfuttaim.co.ae> >


        -----Original Message-----
        From:   Peter Dow [SMTP:pcdow@yahoo.com]
        Sent:   Tuesday, December 14, 1999 12:00 AM
        To:     MIDRANGE-L@midrange.com
        Subject:        Railroad tracks and space technology  or  how your
specifications will live forever

        This is off topic, but I figured everyone on this list could really
appreciate it (think Y2K).
         
        A useless fact (with a twist) about technology:
        
        The US standard railroad gauge (distance between the rails) is 4
feet 8.5inches. 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 them 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?
         
        The first long distance roads in Europe (and England) were built by
Imperial Rome for their legions. The roads have been used ever since.
        
        And the ruts?
         
        Roman war chariots first made the initial ruts, which everyone else
had to match for fear of destroying their wagon wheels and wagons.  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 war chariot.
        
        Specifications and bureaucracies live forever.  So, the next time
you are handed a specification and wonder which horse's [rear] 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.
        
        And now, the twist to the story...
        
        There's an interesting extension to the story about railroad gauges
and horses' behinds.  When we 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.  Thiokol makes the SRBs at
their factory at 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 from the factory had
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 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
[rear]!
        
        
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