“The train follows the track!
There is no looking back!
Of course if there’s some slack
Just Watch out for any crack!”
Some years back there was an interesting forward which was found to be more or less true which is a rarity in WhatsApp forwards which is why I have stopped forwarding any ‘facts’! This one was very interesting since it said that the modern rocket back is actually the size of two horse’s behind!
Read on!
Now the standard railroad gauge (distance between the rails) is four feet or 8.5 inches (US and their standards!). In normal human being terms; A standard-gauge railway is a railway with a track gauge of 1,435 mm ( 4 ft 8+1⁄2 in). The standard gauge is also called Stephenson gauge (after George Stephenson), international gauge, UIC gauge, uniform gauge, normal gauge and European gauge in Europe, and SGR in East Africa!
The sequence described now is a famous one and is replicated more or less the same!
Now most standards gauge was initially built in England! And it was replicated by them in other parts of the world!
Now 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 the old rutted roads? The first long distance roads in Europe (including England) were built by Imperial Rome for their legions. The roads have been used ever since!
And ruts in the roads? The initial ruts were formed by Roman war chariots, 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!
Finally that distance is the standard railroad gauge of 4 feet, 8.5 inches! Which derives from the original specification for an Imperial Roman war chariot.
The Imperial Roman war chariots were made just wide enough to accommodate the back ends of two warhorses!
There is a new modern twist to this!
A a space shuttle sitting on its launch pad has two big booster rockets attached to the sides of the main fuel tank!
These are Solid Rocket Boosters, or SRBs.
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, therefore, 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 horses’ behinds!
So over two thousand years ago, the width of two horses’ behinds turned out to be a major design feature of what is arguably the world’s most advanced transportation system!
Am sure when we have an advanced vehicle developed for interplanetary transport, it will be the size of two horse’s behind! Now that may be music to a donkey! Music makes me think about the birthday celebrity Pritam Chakraborty!
Now do not think about a Meter gauge and sleep!
Shubh Ratri!
ramadocblog 