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 US Railroads. But, 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's the gauge they used. Why 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.
Okay! Why did the wagons have that particular 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's the spacing of the wheel ruts. So who built those old rutted roads? Imperial Rome built the first long distance roads in Europe (and England) for their legions, and many of these roads have been used ever since.
And the ruts in the roads? Roman war chariots formed the initial ruts, which everyone else had to match for fear of destroying their wagon wheels. So, the United States standard railroad gauge of 4 feet, 8.5 inches is derived from the original specifications for a Roman war chariot. 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 closer than you know because the Imperial Roman war chariots were made just wide enough to accommodate the back ends of two war horses.
Now here's the twist to the story. When you see a Space Shuttle sitting on its 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 Morton Thiokol at their factory at Utah. The engineers who designed the SRBs would have preferred to make them a bit wider, but the SRBs had to be shipped by train from the factory to the Florida launch site.
The railroad line from the factory happens to run through a tunnel in the Rocky 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' butts. As a result, a major design feature of what is arguably the world's most advanced transportation system was determined over two thousand years ago by the width of two horses' asses.
Don't you love engineers?
