The US standard railroad gauge (width between the two rails) is 4 feet, 8.5 inches. That's an exceedingly odd number. Why was that gauge used? Train
Because that's the way they built them in England, and the US railroads were built by English expatriates.
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? The first long distance roads in Europe (and England) were built by Imperial Rome for their legions. The roads have been used ever since. And the ruts in the roads? Roman war chariots first formed the initial ruts, which everyone else had to match for fear of destroying their wagon wheels. Since the chariots were made for (or by) Imperial Rome, they were all alike in the matter of wheel spacing.
The United States standard railroad gauge of 4 feet, 8.5 inches derives from the original specification for an Imperial Roman war chariot. Specifications 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 war chariots were made just wide enough to accommodate the back ends of two war horses. Thus, we have the answer to the original question.
There's an interesting extension to the story about railroad gauges and horses' behinds. When we 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 might 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 had 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 is about as wide as two horses' behinds. So, the major 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!
David Turner
That is almost interesting enough to reply to
Ian Richardson
Nice story. There are a few differences in railroad gauge depending on countries though.
Luis Cooper
Most of the world uses that gauge too (converted to metric), except Russia which has their own gauge. It is possible to travel to from the U.S to the tip of South America by rail.
Daniel Adams
The difference in the Russian gauge was a political act to prevent German invasion though right?
Apparently either they wanted to avoid french gauge, because fear of invasion after Napoleon, or they thought bigger gauge meant they would build bigger locomotives to fit the mountainous landscape. (wikipedia Iberian gauge=)
Lincoln Watson
false
Jaxson Thomas
Op was cool bro today Nice story
Brayden Rodriguez
legitamately cool story
Josiah Wright
Standard gauge first appeared on George Stephenson's Killington line. Its success's led to wide option but butted against Brunel's wider gauge leading to a "gauge" war.
Stalin adopted nonstandard gauges to slow down German advances on the eastern front in WW2
