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The bamboo construction is part of the Folkestone triennial art festival. The abandoned tracks led to the railway station at the harbours edge.

Railroad station, Medias, Romania

January 18, 2014. Looking north from the Wallace Avenue footbridge on a snowy day. The tracks are part of the Georgetown Go Line. Work is being done on the future Union-Pearson air-rail link.

Walter B. Claflin, photographer.GC-1234

TRACKS BEACH

Waianae coast.

Day 36: Project 365

UVA-Cal st - Michigan tri meet in Charlottesville VA

Bronica S2

50mm Nikkor

Acros

EI 100

x-tol 1:1

 

© Jonathan Merritt

NMH Track vs. Cushing Academy and Worcester Academy at Northfield Mount Hermon on April 15 2017. Photography by Greg Leeds.

Love, like sex, is largely transactional and basically a 'service'.

 

Apparently I missed the longbus and caught the shortbus instead.

In Scottish highland plantation forest

Train tracks leaving Olde Town Arvada, Colorado and heading west toward the Continental Divide

The RR lift bridge over the Saint Croix River in Prescott Wisconsin.

Batumi Botanical Garden

American railroad tracks are 56.5" wide (the "gauge") because the English built the first railroads in America and they used that width. Why did they use that width? 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 were used for building wagons which used that wheel spacing.

 

Why did wagons have that particular odd wheel spacing? Because older wagon ruts throughout England used that spacing, and if they changed it, wagon wheels would break by either falling into or being forced out of the old ruts, which were 56.5" wide.

 

The old ruts were that size because the roads were built by the Romans, who arrived in England in 54 BC and left about 400 AD. Their wagons, and their chariots before their wagons, used that spacing, and that spacing was used all over Europe and wherever Rome conquered, because their wagons used the identical wheel base everywhere. So the modern railroad track width derives from the Roman chariot.

 

Why was the Roman chariot track width 56.5"? Because that was the width of a chariot that would equal the width of two "standard" Roman horses. Thus, wagon and horses would fit through the same narrow street. Specifications and bureaucracies live forever!

 

Such curious dimensions continue today. 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, made by Thiokol at their factory in Utah. 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 had to fit through that tunnel. The tunnel is just wide enough to accomodate a railroad car, and the railroad track is about as wide as two horses' behinds, (and we now know why) so the booster rockets were made to fit.

 

The major 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!

 

www.naciente.com/essay94.htm

Track Designer docs of the 2019 layout and monorail build

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