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.
> 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. 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 live forever.
>
> So the next time you find a specification/procedure/process and
> wonder
> 'What horse's ass came up with it?', you may be exactly right.
> Imperial Roman army chariots were made just wide enough to
> accommodate
> the rear ends of two war horses. (Two horse's 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 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? Ancient horse's asses control almost
> everything... and CURRENT Horses Asses are controlling everything else.