What horse’s ass came up with this? Well, you may be exactly right!
I heard this explanation a while back and got the text again from this Space Shuttle Page. I can’t say I know for sure if it is true, but I bet it is fairly accurate.
4 commentsThe 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 the US railroads were built by English expatriates. Why did the English people 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 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 old 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 by, or for, Imperial Rome they were all alike in the matter of wheel spacing. Thus we have the answer to the original questions:
The United States standard railroad gauge of 4 feet, 8.5 inches derives from the original specification for an Imperial Roman army war 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.
But there’s more to this story…
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 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 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.
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Kinda sorta… :)
http://www.snopes.com/history/american/gauge.asp
Yup! I should have checked snopes first. But I guess there may be a little truth in the fun story. But its not 100%.
Thank you, Sir.
“Horses asses” have been designing things for eternity.
Which came first the “horses ass” or the horses ass?
Great story though! This made me think about the height limitations placed on the (huge) new Queen Mary 2 ocean liner.
The smokestack height in the ship’s original design had to be reduced to allow the huge ship to fit under the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge in New York City. Even with the new squat smokestack, the QM2 clears the bottom of the bridge by less than 10 feet (tide and thermal bridge expansion considered).
Also, during the assembly of the Airbus A380 in France (parts are made in UK, GR, SP and FR), large sections of wing and fuselage had to be trucked through the countryside to avoid the low overpasses on the highways. There were some very tight maneuvers in a few small towns, where the massive trucks barely fit between the buildings facades on either side.