Railroad tracks thank the Romans

Be sure to read the final paragraph; your understanding of it will depend on the earlier part of this article.

The US standard railroad gauge (the distance between the rails) is 4 feet, 8.5 inches. That is an exceedingly odd number.

Why was that gauge used? Because that is the way they built them in England, and it was the English expatriates who built the US railroads.

So why did the English build them like that? Because the same people built the first rail lines, 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 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 is 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. The roads have been used ever since.

In addition, 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. Since the chariots were made for Imperial Rome, they were alike in the matter of wheel spacing. Therefore, the United States’ standard railroad gauge of 4 feet, 8.5 inches is 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 horse’s ass came up with it?’, your question may be closer to the truth than you imagine. Imperial Roman army chariots were made just wide enough to accommodate the rear ends of two warhorses (or two horse’s asses). Now, 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 Thiokol at their factory in Utah makes sRBs. The engineers who designed the SRBs would have preferred to make them a bit fatter, but they 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 2,000 years ago by the width of a horse’s ass. Moreover, you thought being a horse’s ass was not important. Ancient horse’s asses control almost everything... and of course, contemporary horse’s asses are controlling everything else.