The Logic of Legacy

In my quest to educate people in the culture of bureaucracy and the happy continuation of the Captain Darling School of Pedants I thought this would be interesting.......

The US Standard railroad gauge (distance between the inside of the rails) is 4 feet, 8.5 inches. That's a strangely odd number.

Why that gauge?

Because that's the way they built them in England, and the US railroads were built by English navvies.

Why did the English use that gauge?

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 was that gauge used?

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 use that particularly odd wheel spacing?

This spacing was the optimum to be used on the roads of ye ole England.

So who built these old roads?

The first roads in Europe were built by Imperial Rome for the benefit of their legions. The initial ruts, which everyone else had to match for fear of breaking their wagons, were first made by Roman war chariots. 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 war chariot. Specifications and Bureaucracies live forever!

To complete the 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 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 arse!

Later, GrocerJack