| Railroad Gauge and Horses' Behinds |
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 people 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 use that odd wheel spacing? Well,
if they tried to use any other spacing the wagons would break
on some of the old, long distance roads, because that's the
spacing of the old wheel ruts. So who built these old rutted
roads?  The
first long distance roads in Europe were built by Imperial Rome
for the benefit of their legions. The roads have been used ever
since. And the ruts? The initial ruts, which everyone else had
to match for fear of destroying their wagons, were first made
by Roman war chariots. 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 army war
chariot. Specs and bureaucracies live forever. So, the next
time you are handed a specification and wonder what horse's
ass came up with it, you may be exactly right. Because the Imperial
Roman chariots were made to be just wide enough to accommodate
the backends of two war horses.
 Now the twist to the story... There's an interesting extension
of the story about railroad gauge and horses' behinds. When
we see a Space
Shuttle sitting on the launch pad, there are two big booster
rockets attached to the sides of the main fuel tank. These are
the solid rocket boosters, or SRBs. The SRBs are made by Thiokol
at a 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 to the factory runs through a tunnel in the mountains.
The SRBs had to fit through that tunnel. The tunnel is slightly
wider than a 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 by the width of
a horse's ass!
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