The US standard railroad gauge (distance between the rails) is 4 feet 8.5 inches   
        Engineering Information

The 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 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 have that particular odd wheel spacing?
Well, if they tried to use any other spacing the wagon wheels would
break on some of the old, long distance roads in England, because
that's the spacing of the wheel ruts.

So who built those old rutted roads?
The first long distance roads in Europe (and England) were built by Imperial
Rome for 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 wagon wheels and wagons, were first made by Roman war chariots.  Since
chariots were made for, or by Imperial Rome, they were all alike in the
matter of wheel spacing.

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 war chariot.
Specifications and bureaucracies live forever.  So the next time you are
handed a specification and wonder what horses ass came up with it, you may
be exactly right.  Because the Imperial Roman war chariots were made just
wide enough to accommodate the back ends of two war horses.  Now the twist
to the story.............

There's an interesting extension to the story about railroad gauges and
horses' behinds.  When we see a Space Shuttle sitting on its launch pad,
there are two big boosters rockets attached to the sides of the main fuel 
tank.  These are solid rocket boosters, or SRB's.  The SRB's are made by 
Thiokol at their factory in Utah.  The engineers who designed the SRB's 
might have preferred to make them a bit fatter, but the SRB's 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 SRB's 
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, the 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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