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The above-quoted item about the gauge of modern American railroads' having been slavishly copied from the measurements of ancient Roman war chariots is a concept first expressed at least well over a century ago, as exemplified by this nugget from a 1905 issue of Popular Mechanics: This item is one that, although wrong in many of its details, isn't completely false in an overall sense and is perhaps more fairly labeled as Partly true, but for trivial and unremarkable reasons. Marveling that the width of modern roadways is similar to the width of ancient roadways is sort of like getting excited over a notion along the lines of modern clothes sizes are based upon standards developed by medieval tailors. Well, duh. Despite obvious differences in style, clothing in the Middle Ages served the same purpose as clothing today (i.e., to cover, protect, and ornament the human body), and modern human beings are very close in size to medieval human beings (we are, on average, a little bit taller and heavier than we were several centuries ago, but not so much), so we naturally expect ancient and modern clothing to be similar in size. So, rather than going into excruciating detail about the history of transportation, we'll simply note that roads are built to accommodate whatever uses them, and that for many centuries prior to the advent of railroads, what traveled on roads were mostly wheeled conveyances, pulled by beasts of burden (primarily horses), carrying passengers and goods. Physical conditions dictated some of the dimensions of those conveyances (such as the width of their axles) and largely ensured that they would fall within a fairly narrow range of variation: Horse-drawn vehicles, whether they were chariots or carts or carriages, all served similar functions, so practical considerations (e.g., the speed at which horses could travel, the amount of weight horses could pull, the number and arrangement of horses that could be controlled by a single driver) required that they be relatively similar in size as well. That may suffice as an explanation covering the specific combination of horse-drawn vehicles and roads, but what about vehicles that traveled on rails instead of roads (such as trolleys), or that weren't pulled by horses (such as trains)? Why should they be similar in size to their predecessors? Although we humans can be remarkably inventive, we are also often resistant to change and can be persistently stubborn (or perhaps practical) in trying to apply old solutions to new conditions. When confronted with a new idea such as a rail, why go to the expense and effort of designing a new vehicle to use on it rather than simply adapting ones already in abundant use on roadways? Wouldn't it make sense to put the same type of conveyance pulled by regular horses on the ground behind an iron horse running along a rail? That is indeed what was tried in the early days of American railroads, as captured in the following illustration: (The caption reads: This locomotive in New York State, like its other early counterparts, pulled passenger cars based on old-fashioned carriages. The technology evolved quickly in the 1840s, however, and the United States played an important role in that evolution.) Similar thinking occurred in Britain. Historian James Crow, writing about Housesteads, the 3rd century Roman fort built along Hadrian's Wall, notes that: It is rather inaccurate to claim that US railroads were built by English expatriates, but it is fair to say that since the English started to develop railroads slightly ahead of the Americans, some U.S. railroads used equipment purchased from English manufacturers, thus necessitating that the rails on which that equipment ran be the same size in both countries: And once the Americans caught up, they began selling railroad technology back to England, further establishing a similarity of equipment (and hence track size) between the two countries: Nonetheless, claims about a direct line descent between ancient Roman chariot tracks and the standard U.S. railway gauge jump the tracks when confronted with the fact that despite some commonality of equipment, well into the 19th century the U.S. still did not have one standard railroad gauge. At the time of the Civil War, even though nearly all of the Confederacy's railroad equipment had come from the North or from Britain (of the 470 locomotives built in the U.S. in 1860, for example, only 19 were manufactured in the South), 113 different railroad companies in the Confederacy operated on three different gauges of track. This lack of standardization was, as historian James McPherson pointed out, one of the many reasons the Union was able to finally vanquish the Confederacy militarily: The eventual standardization of railroad gauge in the U.S. was due far less to a slavish devotion to a gauge inherited from England than to the simple fact that the North won the Civil War and, in the process, rebuilt much of the Southern railway system to match its own: In other words, there was nothing inevitable about a railroad gauge supposedly traceable to the size of wheel ruts in Imperial Rome. Had the Civil War taken a different course, the eventual standard railroad gauge used throughout North America might well have been different than the current one. As for the Space Shuttle addendum to this piece, when Thiokol was building the solid rocket boosters (SRB) for the space shuttle, they had to keep shipping considerations in mind, but they didn't have to alter their design because any particular tunnel that lay between their plant and the Florida launch site wasn't large enough.Railroads don't run through tunnels only slightly wider than the railroad track unless every one of their engines and all their rolling stock are also only slightly wider than the railroad track, and unless all tunnels encompass only a single set of tracks. Data from the U.S. Army's Rail Transport in a Theater of Operations document, for example, makes it fairly clear that one would be hard-pressed to find railroad equipment anywhere only slightly wider than 4 feet, 8.5 inches. Over and above our love of odd facts, this tale about railroad gauges succeeds because of the imagery of its play on words: space shuttle technology was designed not by a horse's ass (figuratively, some overpaid government know-it-all) but because of a horse's ass (literally, the width of that particular portion of equine anatomy). People find this notion amusing, feeding the story's popularity as charmed readers continue to pass it along to others in a cascade of forwards. Very interesting, educational, historical, completely true, and hysterical? One out of five, maybe.
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