Railroad Tracks and Bureaucracies

[Source Unknown]

The final paragraph is essential to your understanding.

The US standard railroad gauge (distance between the 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 US 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.
Bureaucracies live forever.

So the next time you are handed a specification/procedure/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. (Two horses'
asses.) Now, the twist to the story:

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 ass. And you thought
being a horse's ass wasn't important? Ancient horse's asses control
almost everything... and

CURRENT Horses Asses are controlling everything else.