Railroad Tracks Are How Wide Apart?

[Bernie]

A friend just sent me this...

RAILROAD TRACKS ARE HOW WIDE APART?

Does the statement, 'We've always done it like that' ring any bells?

The US standard railroad gauge (distance between the rails)
is 4 feet, 8.5 inches. That's an exceedingly odd number.
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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 the tramways used the same jigs and tools that they 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 (and England ) for their legions.
The 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 ass came up with it?' you may be exactly
right. Imperial Roman army chariots were made just wide enough to
accommodate the back ends of the rear ends of two war horses... or 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 attach ed to the sides of the main fuel
tank. These are solid rocket boosters, or SRBs. The SRBs are made by
Thiokol at their factory at 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 RBs 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 ass.

And you thought being a horse's ass wasn't important?

Ancient horse's asses control almost everything....

and CURRENT Horses Asses are controlling everything else!!
(You need look no further than Washington to confirm this.)

[KoolChris]

GENIUS!!

I had no idea, but it's all very logical.