Does the statement, “We’ve always done it that way” ring any bells?
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.
Click Read More to find out where this is going…
Does the statement, “We’ve always done it that way” ring any bells?
The US standard railroad gauge (distance between the rails) is 4 feet, 8.5inches. 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 werebuilt by the same people who built the pre-railroad tramways, and that’s thegauge they used.
Why did “they” use that gauge then? Because the people who built thetramways 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, ifthey tried to use any other spacing, the wagon wheels would break on some ofthe old, long distance roads in England, because that’s the spacing of thewheel ruts.
So who built those old rutted roads? Imperial Rome built the first longdistance roads in Europe (and England) for their legions. The roads havebeen used ever since.
And the ruts in the roads? Roman war chariots formed the initial ruts, whicheveryone else had to match for fear of destroying their wagon wheels. Sincethe chariots were made for Imperial Rome, they were all alike in the matterof wheel spacing. The United States standard railroad gauge of 4 feet, 8.5inches is derived from the original specifications for an Imperial Roman warchariot. And bureaucracies live forever.
So the next time you are handed a specification and wonder what horse’s asscame up with it, you may be exactly right, because the Imperial Roman warchariots were made just wide enough to accommodate the back ends of two warhorses.
Now the twist to the story…
When you see a Space Shuttle sitting on its launch pad, there are two bigbooster rockets attached to the sides of the main fuel tank. These are solidrocket boosters, or SRBs. The SRBs are made by Thiokol at their factory atUtah. The engineers who designed the SRBs would have preferred to make thema bit fatter, but the SRBs had to be shipped by train from the factory tothe launch site. The railroad line from the factory happens to run through atunnel in the mountains. The SRBs had to fit through that tunnel. The tunnelis slightly wider than the railroad track, and the railroad track, as younow know, is about as wide as two horses’ behinds.
So, a major Space Shuttle design feature of what is arguably the worlds mostadvanced transportation system was determined over two thousand years ago bythe width of a horse’s ass…. and you thought being a HORSE’S ASS wasn’timportant!