Expo Line - Surrey Langley Extension: Planning & Pre-Construction

[Migrant_Coconut]

It's almost like the urban legend of how American Standard Gauge came about.

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? Because the American railways were designed by British expats, and that was the gauge they used in Britain.

Why did the British build them like that? Because the people who built the first rail lines also 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.

Their wagons had that particular odd wheel spacing because if they tried to use any other spacing, the wagons would break down on some of the old, long distance roads in England, because that’s the width of the roads.

Those old roads were built by the Romans, who built more or less all of the first long distance roads in Europe. The roads have been used ever since, and everybody's had to build their wagons to fit on those roads.

And those roads were built that way because - you guessed it - the Romans only needed them to be wide enough to fit their wagons. The United States standard railroad gauge of 4 feet, 8.5 inches derives from the original specification for a Roman wagon.

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 Roman wagons were made just wide enough to accommodate two horses' asses.

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It gets better.

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.

In conclusion, the size of the auxiliary engines of humanity’s most advanced vehicle EVER was determined over two thousand years ago by the width of a horse’s ass. And you wonder why you can never get anywhere in life.