IEEE Electrification Magazine - June 2015 - 36
From Where Do Engineering Standards Come?
* The U.S. Standard railroad gauge (distance between the rails) is 4 ft, 8.5 in, which is an odd number. Why was that
gauge used? Because that's the way they built them in England, and the U.S. 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
prerailroad tramways, where that gauge was 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 destorying 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 U.S. standard railroad gauge of 4 ft, 8.5 in derives from the
original specification for an imperial Roman army war chariot. 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...When we see a space shuttle sitting on its launching pad, there are two booster rockets
attached to the side of the main fuel tank. These are solid rocket boosters (SRBs). The SRBs had to be shipped by
train from the factory to the launch site through a tunnel in the mountains. The tunnel is slightly wider than the railroad
track, and the railroad track is about as wide as two war horses' behinds. So, the major 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
back end!
Figure 1. A humorous presentation on the origin of standards presented 25--27 July 2005 at the IEEE ESTS in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
Shipwide Electric Power and Energy
Management and Control
System Protection
Other
Ship
System
Controls
Shore Power
Interface
Power
Generation
Energy Storage
Figure 2. A functional medium-voltage dc (MVDC) block diagram.
36
I E E E E l e c t r i f i c ati o n M agaz ine / j un e 2015
MVDC Bus (Connect, Disconnect,
Control, and Information)
Bus Regulation
(Power Conditioning)
Pulse Load
Propulsion
Ship Service
Dedicated HighPower Load
Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Electrification Magazine - June 2015
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