I had a couple of interesting conversations with fellow members at our most recent club meeting on the subject of 'scale'. Let's face it , it's something we often boggle at and I made mention of in a recent article on the Graf Spee where there are no less than EIGHT different scaled models of that ship?
This amusing but factual reckoning on 'scale' might go someway to reassuring those of us who remain perplexed by the plethora of scales in our hobby....?
The US standard railroad gauge (distance between the rails) is 4 feet, 8.5 inches. That's an exceedingly odd measurement I think you'd agree? So why was that gauge used?
Answer; that's the way they built them in England, and English expatriates built the US Railroads.
So 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.
Okay! 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.
So who built those old rutted roads?
Imperial Rome built the first long distance roads in Europe (and England) for their legions. The 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. Since the chariots were made for Imperial Rome, they were all alike in the matter of wheel spacing meaning in reality, the United States standard railroad gauge of 4 feet, 8.5 inches is derived from the original specifications for an Imperial Roman war chariot - proving if nothing else bureaucracies live forever.
So the next time you contemplate a 'build' and find it impossible to match the scale to anything else and wonder what 'horse's ass' came up with it in the first place - you may be exactly right!!! Those Imperial Roman army chariots were made just wide enough to accommodate the back ends of two war horses!
Finally, when we used to see the Space Shuttle sitting on its launch pad with two big booster rockets attached to the sides of the main fuel tank, the solid rocket boosters, or SRB's - well these were made by Thiokol at their factory at Utah. The engineers who designed the SRBs would 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 happens to run through a tunnel in the mountains and the SRBs had to fit through that tunnel. The tunnel is only slightly wider than the railroad track and the railroad track, as you now know, is about as wide as two horses' behinds. So, a major Space Shuttle 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.
This means all our modelling scale-related problems are the fault of the Italians!!!
Happy modelling!
And - you thought being a HORSE'S ASS wasn't important!
