Forum Post: Bureaucracies can live forever.

The US standard railroad gauge (distance between the rails) is 4 feet, 8.5 inches. Why was that gauge used?

Because that's the way they built them in England and English expatriates designed the US railroads. 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 did 'they' use that gauge then?

Because the people who built the tramways used the same jigs and tools that they had used for building wagons, which used that wheel spacing. Why did the wagons have that particular odd wheel spacing?

Because on old long distance roads in England, that is the spacing of the ruts in the road made by other wheels, and if they tried to use any other spacing, the wagon wheels would break on, ride rough, and otherwise have issues of not matching the ruts in the road. So who built those old roads and how did they get these wheel ruts in the first place?

Imperial Rome built the first long distance roads in Europe (including England ) for their legions. Those 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. Since the chariots were made for Imperial Rome , they were all 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 can live forever.

The next time you are handed a specification/procedure/process and wonder 'What horse's ass came up with this?', you may be exactly right. Imperial Roman army chariots were made just wide enough to accommodate the rear ends of two war horses.

Now - the twist to the story: A Space Shuttle sitting on its launch pad has 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 a 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 one of the world's most advanced transportation systems, was determined over two thousand years ago by a little more than twice the width of a horse's ass!