History lesson
05 October 23
Railroad tracks are fascinating! The U.S. standard railway gauge i.e., the distance between the rails, is four feet, eight and a half inches which is an exceedingly odd number.
Why was that gauge used? Because that is the way they built them in England, and English expatriates built the U.S. railroads and indeed, most of the Australian railways.
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 is 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.
Why did the wagons have that peculiar 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 is the spacing of the wheel ruts worn into the road surface.
Roman war chariots formed the initial wheel ruts, which everyone else had to match for fear of destroying their wagon wheels. Since the chariots were made for Imperial Rome, they were all alike in the matter of wheel spacing throughout their empire. So, who built those old rutted roads? Imperial Rome built the first long distance roads in Europe and England for their legions. As they were well made and straight, they have been used ever since.
Therefore, the United States standard railway gauge and the ruts in the road four feet, eight and a half inches apart, are derived from the original specifications for an Imperial Roman war chariot. Bureaucracies live forever! So, the next time you are handed a specification/procedure/process and wonder what ‘horses arse came up with it?’ You may be exactly right. Imperial Roman army war chariots were made just wide enough to accommodate the rear ends of two war horses (two horses’ arses). Now comes the twist to the story:
When you 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 solid rocket boosters, or SRBs. The SRBs are made by Thiokol at their factory in Utah. The engineers who designed the SRBs would 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 happens to run through a tunnel in the mountains, and the SRBs had to fit through that tunnel. The tunnel is slightly wider than the railroad track, and the railroad track, as you now know, is about as wide as two horses’ behinds.
So, a major Space Shuttle design feature of what is arguably the world’s most advanced transportation system was determined over two thousand years ago by the width of a horse’s arse! And you probably thought that being a horse’s arse wasn’t important? Ancient horses’ arses control almost everything and current horses’ arses are controlling everything else!
Unfortunately, I do not know whom to credit for the above research. We are, however, indebted to them because it is a remarkable lesson in how history evolves.