-Caveat Lector-
Railroad Gauge
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 back ends 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!
I am sure that a lot of what we do is controlled by similar thinking!
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