[2984] in Humor
FWD: Rail Gauges, History
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Mikhail Khusid)
Wed Nov 3 12:44:57 1999
From: "Mikhail Khusid" <Mikhail_Khusid@notes.teradyne.com>
To: humor@MIT.EDU
Date: Wed, 3 Nov 1999 12:43:35 -0500
---------------------- Forwarded by Mikhail Khusid/NNH/Teradyne on 11/03/99
12:42 PM ---------------------------
"Halmer D. Haag" <halhaag@mindspring.com> on 11/03/99 11:26:00 AM
The History of Shuttle SRB
(I'm not sure about this, but it sounds neat!!!!)
An interesting story to think about the next time we hear, "That's how
we did it last time".
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 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 questions. The United State
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 end 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....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 rear.
|===================================================|
| My name: Hal Haag My ID: halhaag@mindspring.com |
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