I thought this was an interesting story and history lesson (I presume it's
true):
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? Imperial Rome for their legions built
the first long distance roads in Europe (and England). 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 A*s!
Regards,
Steve Peca
Wheaton, Illinois
1958 TR3A - TS23867L
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