[GreenKeys] Fwd: Good Old Engineering Lasts Forever.. HMM

[kf9nz at juno.com]

      Yes, BUT:
                                1. There were several different gauges
used by U.S. Railroads.  The Erie was built to 6 ft gauge.  The thing is
that the major railroads with English money behind them were built to  4'
8-1/2", and as they consolidated they were mostly all converted to that
gauge.  There were many 3 ft gauge, and even 2 ft gauge roads as well as
4' 8", 4' 6" etc.  There was a big train wreck due to one railroad
running "compromise cars" with wide wheel treads on one of the "odd"
gauge tracks.  The fact that 4' 8-1/2 " came from Roman chariots (or at
least Roman roads) is still true.  

                                2.  Well. the tunnels were bored to
accomodate trains that ran on "standard" gauge tracks.   Alpine Tunnel in
Colorado was dug for a 3 ft gauge road, and it was too small to drive an
automobile through.  If U.S. rr's were built to 6 ft gauge, I bet that
the rockets could have been made bigger.

Another Frank - debunking the debunker   ;-)

On Wed, 5 May 2010 21:20:44 -0500 Don Robert House <k9tty at dls.net>
writes:
Frank does a great job of debunking as usual...



Begin forwarded message:


From: Frank Nichols.


==================================
GOOD OLD ENGINEERING LASTS FOREVER Well maybe... See the notes at the end
of this story...

The U.S. standard railroad gauge (distance between the rails) is 4 feet,
8.5 inches.
That is an exceedingly odd number. Why was that gauge used?

Because that's the way they built them in England and the U.S. railroads
were built by English expatriates.
Why did the English build them that way?

Because the first rail lines were built by the same people who built the
pre-railroad tramways, that's the gauge they used.
Why did "they" use that gauge?

Because the people who built the pre-railroads used the same jigs & tools
that they used for building wagons, which used that wheel spacing.
So why did the wagons have this particular odd 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
was the spacing of the road ruts.
So how were these ruts formed?

The first long distance roads in Europe (and England) were built by
Imperial Rome for their legions. These roads have been used ever since.
So, what about the ruts in the roads?

The ruts in the roads, which everyone had to match for fear of destroying
their wagon wheels, were first formed by Roman war chariots. Since the
chariots were made for Imperial Rome, they were alike in the matter of
wheel spacing.

Therefore, the U.S. standard railroad gauge of 4 feet, 8.5 inches derives
from the original specification for an Imperial Roman war chariot.
Specifications & bureaucracies live forever!

So the next time you are handed a specification & wonder what horse's ass
came up with it, you may be literally right, because the Imperial Roman
war chariots were made just wide enough to accommodate the back end of
two war horses. Thus, we have the answer to the original question.

Now for the twist to it all:

When we see a space shuttle sitting on it's launching pad, there are two
booster rockets attached to the side of the main fuel tank. These are
solid rocket boosters, or SRB's. The SRB's are made by Thiokol at their
factory  in Utah. The engineers who designed the SRB's preferred to have
them fatter, but the SRB's had to be shipped by train from the factory to
the launch site. The railroad line from the factory to the launch site
had to run through a railroad tunnel in the mountains. The tunnel was
just slightly wider than the railroad tracks and the railroad tracks were
about as wide as two horses' rumps.

Therefore, a major 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...

DON'T YOU JUST LOVE ENGINEERING?


Spoiler alert.
Now here’s what SNOPES says about it (FALSE).
http://www.snopes.com/history/american/gauge.asp


basically, there is some truth to the idea of wagon wheels matching
ruts, but there were three separate gauges used in the U.S. until after
the Civil War.

As to the SRBs - there are no railroad tunnels “slightly wider” than the
tracks. In round numbers, most locomotives and cars are 10 feet wide, not
4’8”. (see U.S. Army's Tables of Railway Equipment )

Frank
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