The Width of a Horse's Ass!
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
the US railroads were built by English expatriates.
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
(including England) were built by Imperial Rome for their legions. The roads
have been used ever since.
And the ruts in the roads? The initial ruts, which everyone else had to match
for fear of destroying their wagon wheels, were first formed by Roman war
chariots. Since the chariots were made for Imperial Rome, they were all alike in
the matter of wheel spacing.
So 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 what horse's patute 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. Thus, we have the answer to the original question.
Now a twist to the story…
When you 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. The SRBs are made by Morton-Thiokol at their factory
in 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, therefore, 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, a major design feature of what is arguably the
world's most advanced transportation system was determined over two thousand
years ago by the width of two horse's behinds.
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