When I first read the section below in red, I came away thinking it was a pretty nifty piece of trivia that was worthy of sharing since it struck me with a sense of 'Huh, pretty neat'.
Okay, but why did the English build them like that?
The first rail lines were built by the same people who built the wagon tramways, and that's the gauge they used. You'r likely asking why use that gauge? The likely unsurprising reason was that 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, and 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.
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. 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 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.
Remember, bureaucracies live forever, so the next time you are handed a specification/procedure/process and wonder 'What horse's arse came up with this?', you may be exactly right, because Imperial Roman army chariots were made just wide enough to accommodate the rear ends of two average sized war horses. (Two horses' arses)
What does that have to do with the price of tea in India?
These things have a way of percolating through the ages because some smart folks have decided that it's easier to conform than to be a trend setter. For example, when you see a Space Shuttle sitting on its launch pad, 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 fatter, 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 arse.
And you thought being a horse's arse wasn't important?
Ancient horse's arses control almost everything.
Be that as it may, I attempted to give credit to the author, but lo and behold, I discovered that there was something afoot! On a different site, I found the following blurb refuting what was proposed! Having said that, it's still pretty neat to get a historical perspective on something so benign. Who knows what the actual truth is, but since the section below in blue was attributed to a systems engineer for the CNR, I lean towards it being inherently more accurate. Mr A.W. Worth, System Engineer - Standards of Canadian National Railways responded to an inquiry and this is an abbreviated compilation/combination of his response.
Professor O'Hare, who perhaps significantly is a professor of Germanic languages and not of ancient Latin or Greek, has the right general idea, but he is at least 1000 years too late in ascribing standard gauge to the wheel spacing of "Roman war chariots". The Encyclopedia of Railways states that the standard gauge of 4'-8 1/2" goes back long before the time of the Romans. For example, at the time of Darius, king of the Persians (Daniel 6:31) the Persian empire had an excellent system of military roads, over which messengers could drive chariots at top speed. The countryside in Persia is rugged in places, with barren mountain ranges into the rocky flanks of which the military roads were cut. To keep the chariots from going off the side of the mountain while the horses were being lashed along at top speed, grooves were cut into the surface of the rock to hold the chariot wheels. The grooves are at the same centres as rails of standard gauge track are today.
Obviously the system did not start with Darius, but it is only in what at that time was the Persian Empire that the old grooved roads can still be found. It probably goes back at least to Ur of the Chaldees, but in the southern part of the valley of the Tigris and the Euphrates the ground is softer and would not hold the marks.
None of this is to suggest that messrs. Trevithick, Stephenson, etc., used design manuals from the Sumerian and Akkadian empires in deciding upon the 4'-8 1/2" gauge. It only illustrates the principle of parallel evolution, i.e., that 'everything that rises must converge'.
For further discussion of the origin of stone rutways in Sumerian times, see also 'The Pictorial Encyclopedia of Railways', Hamilton Ellis, AI Loco E, FRSA, Hamlyn Publishing Group, 1968, p. 9. It is interesting, for example, that the term 'turnout' is a literal translation of the same expression in ancient Greek.
The Romans did not use chariots for purposes of warfare. Chariots were pretty well technologically obsolete by the time of the Romans, because they had developed horses that were big enough to ride. If you go back 1000 years before that, though, to the late bronze age, the time of Troy, the horses were too small to take the weight of a man in armour, and chariots were the ultimate weapon of warfare. Chariots figure extensively in the Iliad, and in the Bible around the time of Solomon (2 Chronicles 18). The big horses seem to have come into Europe some time later, out of central Asia, with the Scythians. For war, after 600 BC or so, the ancient Greeks and the Romans used cavalry in the modern sense of the term. As anyone who has seen 'Ben Hur' knows, the Romans used chariots for 'fun events' in the Coliseum, but such events were more or less a cross between the Indianapolis 500 and a demolition derby and had no relation to war. The only tribes that still used them in Roman times were backward types like the Britons (see the statue of Queen Boadicea in London), perhaps because the British horses were still rather small. However, the use by the Britons of antique devices such as chariots was considered remarkable enough by the Romans that they made special mention of it.
For discussion in the changeover in military technology from use of chariots to use of mounted cavalry, see 'A History of Warfare', John Keegan, Key Porter Books, 1993, pp. 257-263, 'Macedon and the Culmination of Phalanx Warfare'.
References to "grooves worn in the pavement at Pompeii (and elsewhere) by the wheels of Roman chariots" is demonstrably incorrect. The Romans used chariots very little, and in fact their use in the downtown core of cities was generally illegal. The Romans believed that the primary purpose of streets in the daytime was for pedestrians. In that sense they antedated the idea of the modern pedestrian mall by 2000 years or so. It was only at night, when pedestrians and school children were off the street, that wheeled vehicles were permitted. Those vehicles were not chariots, but heavy four-wheeled utilitarian freight vehicles carrying foodstuffs and all manner of other merchandise for sale in the markets.
The streets being narrow and the lighting poor, grooves were deliberately cut in the pavement to guide the wheels of the heavy freight carts to avoid sideswipes and keep their wheels from striking the raised stones placed at intersections to serve as steppingstones for pedestrians. These grooves were at the same centres as standard gauge railroad rails. The steppingstones served a double purpose. Not only did they give pedestrians a means of crossing the street dryshod in wet weather, but they forced horse-drawn vehicles to come almost to a stop at intersections while the horses picked their feet over the stones. In that way, they served to accomplish what now is done with a 'stop' or 'yield' sign.
Contrary to popular opinion I have not been personally involved in construction and maintenance of tracks for chariots. Steam locomotives, yes, but not chariots.
To turn what has been said by the various correspondents on its head, it does not necessarily follow that something is necessarily wrong just because it has the wisdom of the ages behind it. Ur of the Chaldees had a system of counting by 12's, from which came many of our conventional numbers: 12 inches in a foot, 12 x 440 feet in a mile; 12 months in a year, 12 days of Christmas, and, not coincidentally, 12 Apostles. The system of counting by 10's, which seems to have supplanted counting by 12's before 1000 BC, made a mess of the original Urite system, and a certain French general who succeeded in spreading confusion from Gibraltar to Moscow 1795-1815 decided to finish the job; which is why now we have both the inch-pound and the metric systems to contend with.
A. W. Worth
(Arcturus Valerius Faber)
In the end, who really knows what can be believed when discovered on the Internet, and since the standard railway gauge argument won't really affect my life, I'll resign myself to being content with the fact that I'm thrilled to have experienced some interesting historical facts that leave me with a childlike curiousity about the way things are.
I think that Mr Worth's take on the Internet sums it up, "The moral of it all seems to be that the Internet is a little like 'The National Inquirer'. It may be fun to read, but it isn't necessarily a reliable source."
Consider yourself warned.
Once again, class dismissed.
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