Roman Road

[Subdeacon Joe]

A friend on FB posted this image of a Roman road:

 

It looks like the cobbles are laid out to create lanes.  Anyone have a clue why they were built like that?

[Texas Joker]

Cart wheels rode the cuts between stones and were of a given width.

 

Apocryphal story of why

 

https://www-users.york.ac.uk/~ss44/joke/rail.htm

 

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 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 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 question. The United States standard railroad gauge of 4 feet, 8.5 inches derives from the original specification for an Imperial Roman army war chariot. Specs and Bureaucracies live forever.

---

... and it gets better

(unknown)

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.

Now the twist to the story. . . .

There's an interesting extension of the story about railroad gauge and horses' behinds. When we see a Space Shuttle sitting on the launch pad, there are two big booster rockets attached to the sides of the main fuel tank. These are the solid rocket boosters, or SRBs. The SRBs are made by Thiokol at a 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 to the factory runs through a tunnel in the mountains. The SRBs had to fit through that tunnel. The tunnel is slightly wider than a 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 by the width of a horse's ass!

 

 

[Subdeacon Joe]

Those are way too narrow to be cart tracks, and you can see that the stones were laid that way, not worn down by use.

[Forty Rod SASS 3935]

After umpty-hundred years they look better than a lot of roads built in this country in the last ten years or so, not to mention parking lots paved in the last two years.

[Texas Joker]

40 minutes ago, Subdeacon Joe said:

Those are way too narrow to be cart tracks, and you can see that the stones were laid that way, not worn down by use.

Yes they were laid that way. The  wheels axles were built to length to take advantage of the grout line. Keeping the cart on the road and not bumping over the cobbles causing more broken wheels

 

 

[Larsen E. Pettifogger, SASS #32933]

Does not look like a Roman road to me.  The stones are too uniform in their layout and in too good of condition.  Looks like a more modern garden road.

 

 

 

[Larsen E. Pettifogger, SASS #32933]

Some useless trivia.  There is one surviving map of the Roman road system.  Called the Peutinger map it is 1 1/4 feet wide by 22 feet long.  Everything is linear as the Romans were not famiiar with the globe.  All roads did ultimately lead to Rome.

 

[Larsen E. Pettifogger, SASS #32933]

Close up of one section of the map that you can buy on Amazon and other retailers.

 

[Red Gauntlet , SASS 60619]

I doubt that the original photo is an actual Roman road. Maybe a reconstruction, or computer generated?

[Pat Riot]

Oh yeah, every wagon driver can keep a wagon drawn by a big animal or animals perfectly lined up to ride in the grooves or on the grout…

 

 

[Subdeacon Joe]

I'll admit that I didn't do a search to verify that it's really a Roman road.  The source is usually pretty accurate.

[Texas Joker]

Ya ever drie down the highway and the big trucks have indented the pavement your wheel tend to stay in the track.

 

 

[Smuteye John SASS#24774]

3 minutes ago, Texas Joker said:

Ya ever drie down the highway and the big trucks have indented the pavement your wheel tend to stay in the track.

 

 

I only drive in those ruts in icy or snowy weather (which is rare here in Alabama) when everybody is driving nose to tail. We don't get temps low enough for quick freezing, so I figger following a line of truckers and running in their tracks is more likely to result in me driving in slush than whatever Northern precipitation may be elsewhere on the roadway.  When I was a trucker, that nose to tail and follow in the ruts got me across Indiana, Ohio and Pennsylvania on a couple occasions when I was chased across the country by a winter storm system

 

Otherwise, I straddle them. They are rougher than the normal pavement and there's no sense in rattling teeth loose for no reason.

 

[Pat Riot]

15 minutes ago, Texas Joker said:

Ya ever drie down the highway and the big trucks have indented the pavement your wheel tend to stay in the track.

 

 

A truck is not a wagon and no, I don’t drive in the ruts. 

[Larsen E. Pettifogger, SASS #32933]

46 minutes ago, Pat Riot said:

A truck is not a wagon and no, I don’t drive in the ruts. 

I've been in a rut for the past several years.

[Pat Riot]

6 minutes ago, Larsen E. Pettifogger, SASS #32933 said:

I've been in a rut for the past several years.

Move over to the fast lane and gun it! 

[watab kid]

to the OP = no , im not sure why but its amazing it still exists when the roads here are getting replace as often as they are , but then we dont have slave labor like they did , it still is amazing - even some of the old brick roads in this country still exist as base for our new ones - back in the seventy's i laid a patio in street brick taken up from under modern roads in our town - my father did his driveway ...its still being used today , gotta weed it or spray for vegetation from time to time tho