A Backhanded History Lesson

Railroad tracks. A simple thing we take for granted. Wait till you see how one thing leads to another… 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?


Why did the English build them like that?


Why did ‘they’ use that gauge then?


Why did the wagons have that particular odd wheel spacing?


So who built those old rutted roads?


And the ruts in the roads?


Bureaucracies live forever. So 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. (Two horses’ asses.)

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 SRB’s. The SRB’s are made by Thiokol at their factory in Utah. The engineers who designed the SRB’s would have preferred to make them a bit fatter, but the SRB’s 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 SRB’s had to fit through that tunnel. The tunnel is slightly wider than the railroad track, and the railroad track, as


And I bet you thought being a horse’s ass wasn’t important!

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