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From: "George Lendich" <lendich@optusnet.com.au>
To: "Rotary motors in aircraft" <flyrotary@lancaironline.net>
References: <list-1636909@logan.com>
Subject: Re: [FlyRotary] Re: metric system - 
Date: Mon, 4 Dec 2006 17:59:57 +1000
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Not entirely correct - but who the hell cares.
You will find 4'8" was the original spacing but a 1/2" was added for some 
reason that I can't remember.
The English didn't build the railway, they supplied the first lot of railway 
engines.
The  2 horses arce/ ass is a furphy- apparently!
I guess it depends on what you read on the internet

> Dave, close but not excatly right!
>
> Here the copy of a post from the Atlantica-list (Wingco - BWB - aircraft):
>
> JUST A QUESTION OF STANDARDS
>
> Especially this part.
> Does the statement, "We've always done it that way" ring any bells...?
> 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 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.
>
>
> 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? 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.
>
> The United States standard railroad gauge of 4 feet, 8.5 inches is
> derived from the original specifications for an Imperial Roman war 
> chariot.
>
> And bureaucracies live forever.
>
> So the next time you are handed a spec and told we have always done it
> that way and wonder what horse's ass came up with that, 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.
> 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. 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 ass.
> And you thought being a horse's ass wasn't important ??
> Correction: Horses arse!!
>
> TJ :))
>
>
>
>>
>> On 27, Nov , at 7:07 AM, Sandy wrote:
>>
>>> Let me make sure I have this right.
>>> Two horse's ass's (how do you spell the plural of ass?) determined the
>>> diameter of the Space Shuttle booster rockets.  Is that about it?
>>>
>>  Ass is another name for a donkey; the word you want is 'arse' and the 
>> plural of arse is arses
>> The width of a roman road was determined by the wheel tracks of a roman 
>> war chariot drawn by two horses side by side. When the railroads were 
>> developed in England they followed the main arterial roads which were 
>> originally the roman roads, so the rails were laid on the wheel tracks; 
>> about 5 feet apart. 19th century rail technology in the US came from 
>> England so US railroads indirectly were based on roman roads. The space 
>> shuttle boosters were designed to be transported by rail so the width was 
>> based on roman two horse chariots.
>> That is about it, BR, Dave McC
>>
>> --
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>>
>
>
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