Re: Technology and historical continuity...
Martin F Krafft <krafft@ifi.unizh.ch> wrote:
> 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 English
> expatriates built the US Railroads.
Not all of England was so hung up on history:
The Great Western Railway was created by an Act of Parliament on the 31st
August 1835 to provide a double tracked line from Bristol to London, [...]
the line was to be of the 7 feet 0inch (214 cm) broad gauge.
-- http://www.greatwestern.org.uk/m_in_gwr.htm
In a victory of inertia and political incomprehension over technical
superiority, the last of the broad gauge was removed in the 1890s. This
story has been played out many times with many different players. We must
never let free software be another casualty.
There, I linked it to Debian ;-)
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