The Supercar Registry - Fun fact for no reason other than interesting....

This IS for real.

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 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 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. The 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.

The United States standard railroad gauge of 4 feet,
8.5 inches is derived from the original specifications
for an Imperial Roman war chariot. And bureaucracies
live forever.

So the next time you are handed a spec and told we
have always done it that way and wonder what horse's
ass came up with that, you may be exactly right,

because the Imperial Roman war chariots were made just
wide enough to accommodate the back ends of two war
horses. 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 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.

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 ass. And you thought being a
horse's ass wasn't important ??