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From: Wayne M
Email: wmcaulif@csenergy.com.au
Date: 28 May 2001
Time: 20:01:49

It's not very often that we ask why things are the way they are but here's an
answer for you,

The US standard railroad gauge (distance between the rails) is 4 feet, 8.5
inches. That is 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 that way? 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? Because the people who built the tramways
used the same jigs and tools that they used for building wagons, which used
that wheel spacing.

So why did the wagons have that particular odd 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 was the spacing of the wheel
ruts.

So who built those old rutted roads? The first long distance roads in
England were built by Imperial Rome for their legions. The roads have been
used ever since. And the ruts in the roads? The ruts in the roads, which
everyone 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. The US 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 arse came up with it, you may
be exactly right, because the Imperial Roman war chariots were made just
wide enough to accommodate the back end of two war horses. Thus we have the
answer to the original question.

Now for the twist to the story. When we see a space shuttle sitting on it's
launching pad, there are two booster rockets attached to the side of the
main fuel tank. These are solid rocket boosters, or SRB's. The SRB's are
made by Thiokol at their factory in Utah. The engineers who designed the
SRB's might have preferred to make them a bit fatter, but the SRB's 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 tunnel is
slightly wider than the railroad track, and the railroad track is about as
wide as two horses' rumps. So, a major design feature of what is arguably
the world's most advanced transportation system has determined over two
thousand years ago by the width of a horse's arse! Don't you just love
engineering?