You Tube Clip here

From Core 77

I attended their launch last week at Croydon Photography Studios, with performances by White Birds And Lemons and a solo show by Kirsten Morelle (from New Zealand band Goldenhorse). Big congrats to the boys for a great night and not running out of alcohol. x

The US Standard railroad gauge (distance between the rails) is 4 feet, 8.5 inches. Thats an exceedingly odd number?

Why did they build them like that?

Because the first rail lines were built by the same people who built the pre-railroad tramways, and thats 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?

Because otherwise the wagon wheels would break on some of the old, long distance roads in England, because of the spacing of the wheel ruts.

So who built those rutted roads?

Imperial Romans built the first long distance roads in Europe (and England) for their legions. The roads have been used ever since.

And the road ruts?

Roman war chariots formed the initial ruts, which everyone else had to match for fear of destroying their wagon. 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.

And why were Imperial Roman Army war chariots this width?

They were made just wide enough to accommodate the rear ends of two war horses (two horses' bottoms).

Now the twist to the story:

When you see a Space Shuttle sitting on it's launch pad, there are two solid rocket boosters (SRBs) attached to the sides of the main fuel tank. The engineers who designed SRBs would 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 happened to run through a tunnel in the mountains, and 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.

So.. a major design feature of what is arguably the worlds most advanced transportation system was determined over two thousand years ago by the width of a horses bottom!