Origin of the Rails

I don't know the source of this information, but it was given to me by the Head of the Electrical Engineering Department at Southern Polytechnic State University. He makes a good case for the rails that have been constructed throughout the United States and before that in England. Whether true or not, I felt it was worth posting.

The Origin of the Width Between the Rails:

The US Standard railroad gauge (distance between rails) is 4' 8 1/2". That's an exceedingly odd number. Why was that gauge used? Because that's the way they built them in England, and the US railroads were built by English ex-patriots. Why did the English people build them like that? Because the first rail lines were built by the same people who built he pre-railroad tram ways, and that's the gauge they used. Why did "they" use that gauge then? Because the people who built the tram ways used the same jigs and tools that they used for building wagons, which used that wheel spacing.

Okay! Why did the wagons use that odd wheel spacing? Well, if they tried to use any other spacing the wagons would break on some of the old, long distance roads, because that's the spacing of the old wheel ruts. So who built these rutted roads? The first long distance roads in Europe were built by Imperial Rome for the benefit of their legions. The roads have been used ever since. And the ruts? The initial ruts, which everyone else had to match for fear of destroying their wagons, were first made by Roman war chariots. Since the chariots were made for or by Imperial Rome they were all alike in the matter of wheel spacing. Thus, we have the answer to the original question. The United States standard railroad gauge of 4 feet, 8.5 inches derives from the original specification for an Imperial Roman army chariot. Specs 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 exactly right. Because the Imperial roman chariots were made to be just wide enough to accommodate the back ends of two war horses. Now the twist to the story...


There's an interesting extension of the story about railroad gauge and horse's behinds. When we see a Space Shuttle sitting on the launch pad, there are two big booster rockets attached to the sides of the main fuel tank. These are the solid rocket boosters, or SRBs. The SRBs are made
by Thiokol at a factory in Utah. The engineers who designed the SRBs preferred to make them a bit fatter, but SRBs had to be shipped by train from the factory to the launch site. The railroad line to the factory runs through a tunnel in the mountains. The SRBs had to fit through that tunnel. The tunnel is slightly wider than a railroad track, and the railroad track is about as wide as two horses' behinds. So a major design feature of what is arguably the world's most advanced transportation system was determined by the width of a horse's ass!