Why are railroads that wide?

Bureaucracy lives on.

Engineers will appreciate it. Distance Between the rails

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 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? 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 in the roads? The initial ruts, which everyone else had to match for fear of destroying their wagon wheels, were first formed by Roman war chariots. Since the chariots were made for (or by) Imperial Rome, they were all alike in the matter of wheel spacing. 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 what horse's ass 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. Thus, we have the answer to the original question.

Now the twist to the story..............
There's an interesting extension to the story about railroad gauges and horse's 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. The SRBs are made by Thiokol 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 horse’s behinds. So, the major design feature of what is arguably the worlds most advanced transportation system was determined over two thousand years ago by the width of a Horse's Ass!

😄

I run into crap like that all the time 😒

See and I would say how great is it that a standard can hold for over 2000 years?? I mean imagine if a protocol stuck for that long... hot damn

Bubbaspanky wrote:
See and I would say how great is it that a standard can hold for over 2000 years?? I mean imagine if a protocol stuck for that long... hot damn

Claim: When Philips and Sony developed the compact disc format in the late 1970s, they specifically set its maximum length at 74 minutes to ensure that a single disc could hold all of Beethoven's 9th Symphony.
Status: Undetermined.

Origins: When
Philips and Sony began collaborating on the development of the compact disc, Philips produced an 11.5cm, 14-bit prototype that held 60 minutes' worth of music Sony president Norio Ohga, however, felt that this format was too limited and insisted on a 12cm, 16-bit format that offered 74 minutes' worth of music. Various reasons have been offered to explain why the 74-minute length was chosen, all of them involving Beethoven's 9th Symphony: that length was chosen because Beethoven's 9th was Ohga's favorite piece of music, because it was Sony chairman Akio Morita's wife's favorite piece of music, or because conductor Herbert von Karajan (who recorded for the PolyGram label, a subsidiary of Philips Electronics) "demanded" it. (Herbert von Karajan lent tremendous prestige to the CD by participating in the 1981 Vienna press conference held by Sony to announce the company's prototype, and his recording of the 9th with the Berlin Philharmonic is often claimed to be the reference recording that was used to determine what the CD's maximum length should be.)

The multiplicity of reasons given for the 74-minute choice should in itself be cause for skepticism. Ohga has indicated only that he felt Philips' original format was not ideal, and that a 74-minute CD "would be able to encompass an entire opera or all of Beethoven's 9th Symphony." Since this accommodation could be accomplished by expanding the disc's size from 11.5cm to 12cm and still maintain Ohga's standard of "portability" (i.e., able to fit into a suit pocket), the change was made. There is no evidence to indicate what Ohga or Sony would have done had this expanded size still not been able to hold all of Beethoven's 9th. (Would they have gone with a 12cm, 14-bit disc instead, for example?)

The fact remains that nearly all modern-day recordings of Beethoven's 9th Symphony (including the von Karajan recording with the Berlin Philharmonic often cited as the reference recording) are several minutes shorter than the initial 74-minute maximum length of a CD. Whether Sony simply chose the longer of two discrete lengths (which, fortunately, was long enough to accommodate Beethoven's 9th) or whether they chose a specific length from a range of possibilities is unknown.

That's pretty cool.....