> 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.
>
> 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? The first long distance
> roads in Europe (and England) were built by Imperial Rome for
> their legions. The roads have been used ever since. And the
> ruts? Roman war chariots first made the initial ruts, which
> everyone else had to match for fear of destroying their wagon
> wheels and wagons. 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 war
> chariot. Specifications and bureaucracies live forever. So,
> the next time you are handed a specification and wonder which
> horse's rear came up with it, you may be exactly right. Because
> the Imperial Roman war chariots were made just wide enough to
> accommodate the back ends of two war-horses.
>
> There's an interesting extension to the story about railroad
> gauges and horses' behinds. When we see a Space Shuttle sitting
> on its launch pad, there are two big booster rockets attached
> to the sides of the main fuel tank. These are solid rocket
> boosters, or SRBs. Thiokol makes the SRBs at their factory at
> 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
> slightly wider than the railroad track, and the railroad track
> is about as wide as two horses behinds.
>
> So, the major design feature of what is arguably the world's
> most advanced transportation system was determined by the
> width of a Horse's ass!
>
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