We've Always Done It That Way

References:
floating around the internet

Keywords: tradition, change

The US standard railroad gauge (distance between the rails) is 4 feet, 8.5 inches.

Why? Because that's the way they built them in England, and English expatriates built the US Railroads.

Because the first rail lines were built by the same people who built the pre-railroad tramways, and that's the gauge they used.

Because the people who built the tramways used the same jigs and tools that they used for building wagons, which used that wheel spacing.

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.

Imperial Rome built the first long distance roads in Europe (and England) for their legions. The roads have been used ever since.

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 all alike in the matter of wheel spacing.

The United States standard railroad gauge is derived from the original specifications for an Imperial Roman war chariot. They were made just wide enough to accommodate the back ends of two war horses.

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 Thiokol at their factory at 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. The SRBs had to fit through that tunnel. The tunnel is slightly wider than the railroad track which is about as wide as two horses' behinds.

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 ass.