Posted on 01/11/2006 10:16:24 PM PST by Royal Wulff
They do have a way of changing the carriages so that trains can pass from China to Russia. I assume they have the same provisions at the North Korean border with Russia.
How MIL Specs Live Forever
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 people 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 gage 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 use that odd wheel spacing? Well, if they tried to use any other spacing the wagons would break on some of the old, long distance roads, because that's the spacing of the old wheel ruts.
So who built these old rutted roads? The first long distance roads in Europe were built by Imperial Rome for the benefit of their legions. The roads have been used ever since. And the ruts? The initial ruts, which everyone else had to match for fear of destroying their wagons, were first made by Roman war chariots. Since the chariots were made for or by Imperial Rome, They were all alike in the matter of wheel spacing.
Thus, we have the answer to the original questions. The United States standard railroad gauge of 4 feet, 8.5 inches derives from the original specification (Military Spec) for an Imperial Roman army war chariot. Mil Specs 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 chariots were made to be just wide enough to accommodate the back-ends of two war horses.
Professor Tom O'Hare
Germanic Languages
University of Texas at Austin
Space-Age Addendum
The next time you see the Space Shuttle sitting on the launch pad, take a look at the 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 a company called Thiokol Propulsion, at their factory in Utah. The original engineering design for the SRBs called for them to be a bit fatter and a little shorter, but the SRBs had to be shipped by train from the factory to the launch site.
The railroad line from the factory passed through a tunnel in the mountains. The tunnel is only slightly wider than the railroad track, and the railroad track is about as wide as two horses' behinds.
So, a major design feature of what is arguably the world's most advanced transportation system was determined over 2000 years ago by the width of a horse's behind.
Ken Kuller
Funny. It does make you wonder how many other modern systems are constrained by standards set hundreds or thousands of years ago.
Panamax - biggest boat that can get through the panama canal. Our nuclear aircraft carriers are designed around it.
Somebody mistook him for a Kewpie Doll at a casino in Macao and took him home?
I've heard that story before (minus the space shuttle part). Always found it quite interesting... The Space Shuttle part only makes it more significant.
He's looking for the "cute" clintonista of his dreams, Madeleine Halfbright. The couple fell in love some years ago when she visited him in No Korea and gave him financial aid in the amount of billions of dollars from her boss, comrade clintoon.
They are meeting in a secret location somewhere beyond the great wall.
The tightest design constraint for new army vehicles is the c130 size limit...which exactly mirrors the size of railroad tunnels in austria through the alps...
Check out this site for details...
Be careful passing around rumors. :) I love a good story too and I've fallen for some dooseys. It's good to check the validity.
Here's a lil from the site I mentioned...
Where did the four-foot, eight-and-a-half-inch standard originate? Gabriel says it was from a Englishman named George Stephenson. Carts on rails had been used in mines in England for years, but the width of the rails varied from mine to mine since they didn't share tracks. Stephenson was the one who started experimenting with putting a steam engine on the carts so there would be propulsion to pull them along. He had worked with several mines with differing gauges and simply chose to make the rails for his project 4-foot, eight inches wide. He later decided that adding another six inches made things easier. He was later consulted for constructing some rails along a roadway and by the time broader plans for railroads in Great Britain were proposed, there were already 1200 miles of his rails so the "Stephenson gauge" became the standard.
Interestingly, the 4-foot, eight-and-a-half inch width has not always been the standard in the U.S. According to the Encyclopedia of American Business History and Biography, at the beginning of the Civil War, there were more than 20 different gauges ranging from 3 to 6 feet, although the 4-foot, eight-and-a-half inch was the most widely used. During the war, any supplies transported by rail had to be transferred by hand whenever a car on one gauge encountered track of another gauge and more than 4,000 miles of new track was laid during the war to standardize the process. Later, Congress decreed that the 4-foot, eight-and-a-half inch standard would be used for transcontinental railway.
I'm not trying to ruin anyones fun... I'm just tired of being lied to lately... The Truth for everyone! :)
LOL! I just woke up and was catching up on today's events.
No excuse, I know.
Perhaps he's meeting with Elvis.
Only if Elvis wants to use him in a ventriloquist act: "Now watch as I eat this here peanut butter an' banana sandwich, an' Lil' Kimmy sings 'Love Me Tender.'"
hehe- Kim chi!
He could have stopped for a swim in the Benzene River?
Maybe he thinks a breakdown in North Korea is imminent. Or an offensive is, and he wants to be somewhere safe
which carriers are panamax? I know the constellation was, but most if not all of our modern carriers are WAY bigger than panamax.
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