Railroad Tracks - Lesson for Today

Essa recebi do meu chefe. Se você não sabe inglês minhas sinceras desculpas, estava com preguiça de traduzir...mas no final do post eu resumo a parada em português :P



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 designed 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 had 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 (including England ) for their legions. Those 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 this?' , you may be exactly right. Imperial Roman army chariots were made just wide enough to accommodate the rear ends of two war horses. (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 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, and 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.


Viram só? A largura dos trilhos dos trens nos Estados Unidos foi determinada pelos ingleses, que já usavam essa largura porque ela era usada nas carruagens, que usavam essa largura por que era a largura dos frisos das estradas, que tinham essa largura desde a época do império romano, que usaram essa largura porque era a largura das bigas, que tinham essa largura pra acomodar dois traseiros de cavalo que as puxavam.

A parte curiosa da história é que os foguetes propulsores laterais de um ônibus espacial foram originalmente desenhados pra serem mais "gordos", mas como tiveram que ser transportados de trem da fábrica até onde seriam montados e teriam que passar por um túnel um pouco mais largo do que os trilhos apenas, eles acabaram sendo modificados pra poderem utilizar esse trajeto. Ou seja, o design de uma das partes mais importantes do meio de transporte mais moderno que temos foi determinado há mais de 2000 anos atrás, pela largura de 2 traseiros de cavalo.