The standard North American railroad gauge (i.e. distance between the rails) is 4 feet 8.5 inches because that’s how they were built in England and US railroads were built by English immigrants.
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? Because the people who built the tramways used the same tools they used for building wagons, which used that wheel spacing.
Now the obvious question which comes in mind here is why did the wagons have that wheel spacing? If they tried to use other spacing, the wagon wheels would break on of the old, long distance roads in England, because that’s the spacing of the wheel ruts.
Who built those old roads then? The ancient Romans built the first long distance roads in England. Their chariots formed the initial ruts, which everyone else had to match for the fear of destroying their wagon wheels.
When you see a Space Shuttle, there are two big booster rockets attached to either side of the main fuel tank. These are solid rocket boosters (SRB’s). Reportedly, the engineers who designed them would have preferred them wider, but they had to be shipped by train to the first ever launch site. The railroad line from the factory runs through a tunnel in the mountains. And this design is still followed now because it works properly.
The SRB’s had to fit through that tunnel, which is slightly wider than that railroad track and the railroad track as you 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 thousands of years ago by a horse’s back end!!!
Whether this story is entirely true or not, it gives us the opportunity to consider our own work: why do we do that we’ve just always done that way? Could it be improved? Why not create something new today?
Expressions 