Horses Arse Railway
     
     
The standard railway gauge (distance between rails) is 4 feet, 8.5 inches. Why was that gauge used? Because the first rail lines in Europe were designed and built by the same people who built the pre-railway tramways, and that's the gauge they used. Why did "they" use that gauge then? Because the people who designed and 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? Well, when they tried to use any other spacing, the wagons were prone to breaking down on some of the old, long distance roads, because that's the spacing of the old wheel ruts. So who built these 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 destroying their wagons, were first made by Roman war chariots.

Since the chariots were all made to certain specifications for or by Imperial Rome, they were all alike in the matter of wheel spacing. Why did the design of the Roman army war chariots incorporate that specific track width? Because the chariots were designed to be just wide enough to accommodate the back ends of two war horses. So, the next time you're handed some odd ball specification and you assume that some horse's arse was responsible for coming up with it, you may be exactly right!

Some additional space-age thinking. When we see a Space Shuttle sitting on the launch pad, there are two big booster rockets attached to the sides of the main fuel tank. These are the solid rocket boosters, or SRBs. The SRBs are made by Thiokol at a factory in Utah. The engineers who designed the SRBs might 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 to the factory runs through a tunnel in the mountains. The SRBs had to fit through that tunnel. The tunnel is slightly wider than a railway track, and the railway track is about as wide as two horses' arses.

So a major design feature of what is arguably the world's most advanced transportation system was determined by the width of a horse's arse!
 
 

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