Horses rear end

[LvrLover]

Hey Y'all, I don't know if this is true but it sure is funny.(Actually I am pretty sure it isn't true because somewhere in my brain I seem to remember the Romans used more hand cats and wagons than chariots)





Railroad tracks. This is fascinating.

Be sure to read the final paragraph; your understanding of it will depend on
the earlier part of the content.

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 rear end 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. 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 rear. And you thought being a horse's rear wasn't important? Ancient horse's rears control almost everything...

and CURRENT Horses rears in Washington are controlling everything else