Ever do maintenance in the Navy and come across one of them damned Mil-Spec numbers??? Of course you have… bet you didn’t know where they came from though???
An ol’ Crusty Chief told me this one… it sounds about right for a no shitter!!!!
The US Standard railroad gauge for distance between the rails is specifically four feet & eight and one half inches. That's an extremely odd number if I say so myself... Why was that gauge used? Because that's the way they built the sons-a-bitches in England, and the US railroads were built by English expatriates.
Why did the English people build the damned things like that? Because the first rail lines were built by the same people who built the London tramways before the railroads… and sooo… that’s the gauge they used.
Why did "they" use that gauge then? Okay… fair enough!!! Because the people who built the tramways used the same jigs and tools that they used for building wagons, which used that same wheel spacing.
Okay… Why did the wagons use that odd wheel spacing, that’s pretty peculiar? Well, if they tried to use any other spacing the wagons would break on some of the old, long distance roads, because that's the spacing of the old wheel ruts in those old roads.
So who caused these old ruts in the old rutted roads? The first long distance roads in Europe were built by Imperial Rome for the benefit of their legions. The roads have been used ever since… and the ruts??? The initial ruts, which everyone else had to match for fear of obliterating their wagons, were first made by Roman war chariots. Since the 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 questions. The United States standard railroad gauge of four feet & eight and one half inches derives from the original specification (Military-Spec) for an Imperial Roman army war chariot. Thus, Mil-Specs and bureaucracies live forever.
So, the next time you are handed a specification and wonder what horse's ass came up with That… you may be exactly right!!! Because the Imperial Roman chariots were made to be just wide enough to accommodate the asses of two war horses.
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