Gauge this

Railroad tracks.

The  U.S.  Standard railroad gauge

(distance between 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 English expatriates designed the

U.S. Railroads.

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 had used for

building wagons, which used that wheel spacing.

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?

Imperial Rome built the first long

distance roads in Europe (including  England) for their legions. Those roads have been used ever since.

And the ruts in the roads? Roman war chariots formed the initial ruts, which everyone else had to match for fear

of destroying their wagon wheels.

Since the chariots were made for Imperial  Rome, they were all alike in the matter of wheel spacing. 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. In

other words, bureaucracies live forever.

So the next time you are handed a specification, procedure,

or process, and wonder, 'What horse's ass came up with this?', you may be exactly right.

Imperial Roman army chariots were made just wide enough to accommodate the rear ends of two war horses ...

Now, the twist to the story:

When

you see a Space Shuttle sitting on its launch pad, you will notice

that 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 would have preferred to make them a bit larger, but the SRBs had to be shipped by train from the factory to the launch site. The railroad line from the factory

happens 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, as you now 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 over two thousand

years ago by the width of a horse's ass.

And you thought being a horse's ass wasn't important!

Now you know, Horses' Asses control almost everything...

Explains a whole lot of stuff, doesn't it?