Romans, Horse Asses, US Railroads, Space Shuttles, and Common Writing Paper

Kill Zoners — Bear with me. I promise this headline will make sense. I belong to a police veteran group where this piece was recently posted. Yes, I’m plagiarizing sharing it here because I can’t say it better in my own writing. So please read away, digest the logic or humor, and be sure to comment.

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The United States standard railroad gauge (distance between the inside flanges of the rails) is 4 feet, 8.5 inches or 56 ½ inches wide. That’s an exceedingly odd number.

Why was that gauge used? Well, because that’s the way they built them in England, and English engineers designed the first US railroads.

Why did the English build them like that? Because the first rail lines were built by the same people who built the wagon tramways, and that’s the gauge they used.

So, 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 same wheel spacing.

Why did the wagons have that particularly odd wheel spacing? Well, if they tried to use any other spacing, the wagon wheels would break more often on some of the old, long-distance roads in England. You see, that’s the spacing of the long-established 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 what about the ruts in the roads? Roman war chariots formed the initial ruts, which everyone else had to match or run the risk of destroying their wagon wheels. Since the chariots were made for Imperial Rome, they were alike in the matter of wheel spacing.

Therefore, the United States standard railroad gauge of 4 feet, 8.5 inches, or 56 ½ inches wide, is derived from the original specifications for an Imperial Roman war chariot.

Bureaucracies live forever.

So, the next time you’re handed a specification/procedure/process and wonder What horse’s ass came up with this? you may be exactly right.

For perfect balance, Imperial Roman army chariots were made just wide enough to accommodate the outside width of the rear ends of two harnessed and pulling war horses. (Two horse asses wide.)

Now, here’s the twist to the story.

When you saw a United States Space Shuttle sitting on its launch pad in Florida, you noted the two big booster rockets attached to the sides of the main fuel tank. Those were solid rocket boosters, or SRBs.

The SRBs were made by Thiokol at their factory in Utah. The engineers who designed the SRBs would have preferred to make them a bit fatter, but the SRBs had to be shipped by train from the factory to the Florida launch site.

The railroad line from the Utah 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, as you now know, is as wide as two horse behinds.

So, a major Space Shuttle design feature, of what was arguably the world’s most advanced transportation system, was determined over two thousand years ago by the width of horse asses.

And you thought being a horse’s ass wasn’t important?

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Kill Zoners — This chariot-becoming-shuttle story makes sense to me, but what doesn’t make sense (in a completely unrelated way) is why the common paper size we writers use is 8 ½ by 11 inches. Can anyone explain the reason or logic of this? (Wikipedia, Google, Quora, and/or ChatGPT cut ‘n pastes not allowed.) BTW, debunk the horse backside story if you’d like, but remember this is a writers’ site where girls just wanna have fun.

46 thoughts on “Romans, Horse Asses, US Railroads, Space Shuttles, and Common Writing Paper

    • I was just over at a popular indie news site and read a thoroughly pompous guest essay that made me go to the dictionary four times. Bad journalism is alive and well on the internet, and I don’t think AI is going to fix it. Thanks for the comment this morning, George.

  1. I’d heard the train gauge story before but not the space shuttle twist!

    For paper: I suppose writers could use legal size? I wonder why we don’t use A4, which is used in the U.K. and Europe.

      • On a related note, only the US congress could begin to fathom the wisdom of cutting an hour off the beginning of the day, adding it to the end, and somehow believing they’d created a longer day. 🙂

          • You may think that daylight savings time is just rubbing Peter to pay Paul, but it’s not. The key word is “daylight.” The objective was to get more use of the increasing daylight hours for farmers and others during the growing season. As the sun rises earlier and earlier, there’s more daylight hours, so it makes sense to declare 7 ack emma to be 8 ack emma, and so on.

  2. It’s an interesting subject. Railroads and tribnal knowledge.

    Of course we have narrow gauge in several flavors and Russian broad gauge-five feet if memory serves me correctly-that made for all sorts of logistical problems when the Austrian Corporal tried to take on the Russian bear.

    The gauge and build of railroad lines, cuts and bridges also caused logistical nightmares for the Deutsche Reichsbahn when moving armor because of the width of the tracks and the weight of their later Panther and Tiger tanks. There was a special set of treads used for loading and unloading, and the first thing the tank crew had to do when they arrived at the railhead was change the tracks, for which they needed some sturdy fellows.

    Bridges got overloaded by tanks and rail cuts were too narrow which created a nightmare for the railroad.

    It makes you wonder whether anyone in the armor design centers ever considered how much trouble an overweight/overwidth vehicle could cause the people wo were tasked with transporting your elegant overweight overwidth design.

    And, did anyone ever consider that a rairlroad is a finite system? There are only so many cars you can push through a rail line in one 24 hour period, no matter how many fists are banged on any number of tables at headquarters.

    Any number of universities offer degrees in transportation logistics but I reckon the people with those degrees are not the people trying to shove their eight pounds of stuff down a five pound pipe,

    It’s an angle of what we called ‘tribal knowledge’ at McDonnell Douglas. It was discovered that the doors for my beloved MD80s were not being made anywhere near according to print, and the answer from the door fab shop was, “we’ve always done it that way”. They’d been using a marked up DC9 print that dated back to DC8 days when that type of door was first designed.

    • I was just going to comment about the travails Germany encountered on the Eastern Front in both World Wars thanks to using the “narrow” European gauge and having to convert the railroad from broad gauge Russian tracks. Three and a half inches in difference, but it might as well as been a mile.

    • Yes. Prior to the 1980’s the Federal government used Executive sized paper for forms. 8.5 x 10. It was well into the 1990’s before the government stopped requiring the “pink” copy actually be pink. Many law firms had three drawer printers because a three part form needed a white, pink, and yellow copy.

      Also in the 1990’s Word replaced WordPerfect as the only acceptable file format for government submissions. I did some software installs for law offices for that one.

  3. Thanks for the information, Garry. Very entertaining and informative. Makes you wonder about the “standard size” of many other things.

    • For sure, Steve. Ever wonder why a toilet paper roll is a standard width? I’d say to accommodate all the toilet paper holders that have been manufactured worldwide.

  4. What a fun and fantastic post, Garry. “Bureaucracies live forever.” Now there’s a scary thought.

    My son told me the distance from the pitcher’s mound to home plate is 60 feet 6 inches because the original hand-written specs were misread. The distance was supposed to be 60’0″, but the handwriting wasn’t great and the second zero was taken to be a six.

    • When I read this on the vet site, I knew it had to be shared. That’s an interesting bit about the ball diamond measurement, Kay. I didn’t know that but it makes total sense that a mistake could become the rule.

    • In 1969 the pitcher’s mound was lowered from 15″ to 10″. 1968 was the worst year for batters in the history of baseball. Bob Gibson helped.

  5. Very fun post this morning, Garry! The Roman war chariot part of the story, sadly seems like to be a myth. Other than the famous scythed chariots used by Hellenic states like the Pontic Kingdom Caesar came, saw and conquered, chariots were obsolete in the Mediterranean world long before his conquests. Generals rode on horseback, and the legionnaires were foot-sloggers (once called “Marius’s mules” because of the amount and weight of kit they wore). The chariots of Rome were the ones that raced in the Circus Maximus, and had fans easily as passionate as American football fans, with crowds over a hundred thousand watching the races at times.

    Speaking of wacky measurements, the old British monetary pound, which was 240 pence, was divisible by every denomination of coin, from farthing (1/4 pence) to crown, which was five shillings, and a shilling was 12 pence. I’m still in awe of that.

    Of course, it was helpful to have some basic math skills, which can be lacking today.

    • You’re certainly more up on chariots than me, Dale. And on British money. I have no idea how their currency works. have a hard enough time with dollars and cents.

  6. In contrast to things like how long the papermakers arm is or the width of a chariot, European paper sizes are based on folds and cuts to a 1 meter square piece of paper. The math is a little complicated, but it works perfectly.

  7. Boy, did I need a laugh this morning . . . my hat’s off to all y’all.

    So, the next time you’re handed a specification/procedure/process and wonder What horse’s ass came up with this? you may be exactly right.

    Many meetings in my medical career years ended with the boots-on-the-ground folks asking that very question. 🙂

      • I’m sure, Garry.

        Further back in the early ’80s, I worked as a dispatcher for the local sheriff’s department. What I remember from those years is that most things made sense.

        Not anymore . . . I wouldn’t go back to that environment for anything now.

      • Law is a profession that goes back 800 years or more when scribes (ever know anyone named Scribner?) cranked out writs for the great unwashed? I spent many hours up in the stacks at law school, bemused, reading stuff in the English Reports and a lot of the stuff, 400 years old and more, would be readily understandable and usable by any lawyer today. I understand that is the way many folks in India make their livings to this day only they use manual typewriters.

        Plus, it was done with a quill pen by light of candle so when the electricity goes out and the computers breathe their last lawyers will still be happily making other folks’ lives miserable.

  8. Entertaining post, Garry. I’d read the first part before but not the Space Shuttle addition.

    When I learned to sew, I was taught a “yard” of material was the distance between your nose and the fingertips of your extended arm. Also worked to estimate lengths of string, rope, ribbon, etc. Of course, that depends on whose arm is being used, mine or Shaq’s.

  9. Ohhhh, Garry. Only you would post this! Thanks for an entertaining read. I wonder if one of our resident horse lovers could weigh in — are all horses’ behinds about the same width?

    • Hey Sue – As part of research, I was going to measure some horse butt… but I was a bit concerned about getting kicked. So, I’ll accept the 56 1/2 inch spacing as fact.

  10. I worked for the US government for 15 years, and there were a lot of things that made no sense to anyone outside of certain bureaucracies in Washington. Sometimes change was resisted because “we’ve always done it this way.” Other times, change was initiated for no apparent reason other than it gave somebody in an office something to do.
    The smartest boss I ever had in radio (my first and now third career) addressed the first issue with his “meatloaf” story:
    A young man marries a young lady, and a month into their marriage she fixes him a meatloaf. She serves it on a platter with both ends of the loaf cut off. He asks the obvious question: “Why are the ends cut off?” She says, “That’s the way my mother always makes it.”
    A month later they go to Mom and Dad’s house, and Mom serves meatloaf. Both ends are cut off. The new son-in-law says, “Mom, your daughter fixes meatloaf exactly like that. Why do you cut the ends off?” Mom says, “That’s the way my mother fixed it.”
    Now the son-in-law is determined to find the answer. He tells his wife, “We’re going to see your grandmother in the nursing home tomorrow.” The next day, he asks, “Grandma, your granddaughter served me meatloaf with the ends cut off, because she says her mother served it that way. Her mother served us meatloaf with the ends cut off, and she said it’s because you fixed it that way. Why did you fix your meatloaf with the ends cut off?”
    Grandma smiles. “Because back then, I only had a small baking pan.”

    • Great story, David. I just read it to my wife and we had a good chuckle. BTW, my wife makes the same meatloaf recipe ad her mother and grandmother did only they used a full-sized pan.

  11. Great story, Garry. I worked on the railway (British Rail – Western Region, the nationalized version of GWR — God’s Wonderful Railway) way back in the 1970s. [BTW one of the best salaried jobs I ever had]. The guage of the rails was always referred to as ‘the four foot’ and the space between Up and Down rail routes as the ‘six foot’. In addition there was supposed to be a lineside space, where workers on the line could safely withdraw to when a train came through, referred to as ‘the three foot’. Why three foot? Because, guaranteed, there would always be instances when a passenger would randomly inadevertently or deliberately open a wagon door. Wagon doors were around two and a half feet wide — six inches short of three feet. Imagine being stood lineside in the three foot as a loco rushes through at 70 mph plus and a door opens…Over years, and the introduction of sliding carriage doors, that supposed three foot safe lineside zone became two foot (not ‘feet’) then one foot. And on many stretches of track, no distance at all. Problem is the now privatized UK rail network still run commuter rolling passenger stock well past their retirement date with hinged, not sliding, doors. And commuters complain when work needs doing that stretches of line are closed or re-routed in order to offer some lineside protection for rail workers — all for the sake of a lost three foot.

    • Thanks, Bill. Nice comment. As an old railroader (which I was from age 15 to 21) you’ll know that the track gauge widths are wider in the curves.

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