Anyone Else Fascinated By Old Locomotives?

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The U.S. 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 U.S. 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.
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.

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​

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.

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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.
In other words, bureaucracies live forever. So the next time you are handed a specification, procedure,
or 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.
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Now, the twist to the story:

When you see a Space Shuttle sitting on its launch pad, you will notice that 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.
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The engineers who designed the SRBs would have preferred to make them a bit larger, ​
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.

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So, a major Space Shuttle design feature of what is arguably the world's most advanced transportation system was determined over 2,000 years ago by the width of a horse's ass.
And you thought being a horse's ass wasn't important!

Now you know! Horses' asses control almost everything!
 
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😁👆🏻Well perhaps our Performance Sports Car Width between the rails (wheels)
has been determined similarly to the above "unit of measure".
Whereas there is a Driver's Seat and drive-train tunnel and a Navigator Seat.
However we should perhaps NOT :Nono1: relate to our Navigator Seat
with the same terminology of a "horse's a$$" 🤣
 
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LE BARON said:
Seeing the caboose brought back memories of riding back from Montreal in one.
The conductor was reticent about me going up top as he said that idiots often took pot shots at the top windows. Got up there anyways for a little bit.
Click to expand...
I think every kid at one time or another wanted to ride in the caboose. I know I certainly did. Myself,I always wondered what was back there. My first thoughts were it’s where the crew would spend the night if something broke on the train. I pictured a small apartment type place with couches and TV,small kitchen,bedroom and bathroom. I remember my Uncle (He drank heavily) telling me the cupola on top was for spotting and shooting the hobos alongside the rails. I believed him for years. :Spit:
 
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My next door neighbour worked in Northern Ontario for CN. One night he went to the back of the caboose to relive himself when the slack came out of the train. He fell off literally in the middle of nowhere, he had not been watching the road and had no real idea of where he was. His employment with the railroad did not last long. :Biggrin:
 
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Black 03 Z06 said:
My next door neighbour worked in Northern Ontario for CN. One night he went to the back of the caboose to relive himself when the slack came out of the train. He fell off literally in the middle of nowhere, he had not been watching the road and had no real idea of where he was. His employment with the railroad did not last long. :Biggrin:
Click to expand...
Watching a lot of YouTube vids on trains I’ve picked up some of the lingo they use. I had heard that term before “Slack”. I didn’t realize just how much is involved in getting these things up to speed and how much braking/acceleration affects the whole train,front to back.

One of the things I found out is why sometimes you see 3 engines at the front with one or 2 facing backwards. I always thought it was for torque reasons. Lol. It’s so they don’t have to utilize a turntable when the engine returns from the direction it came from. The lead engine usually carries on somewhere else. I’m sure there’s other reasons but that’s one of them I’ve seen on a vid.
 
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