Why Matters - Train tracks, Romans, and Horses Patoots
We’re making a lot of changes lately, and I am currently obsessed with “why”. Tonight I came across a story that explains my obsession quite well, and highlights why asking “why” is critical to process change and quality improvements.
“The standard distance between the rails on a railroad in the United States is 4 feet, 8.5 inches. It seems like an incredibly odd measurement to have. It probably would have been easier to simply make it 5 feet or 4.5 feet. But why is the standard that way and how did it happen?
Here is a look into the corporate mind that is very interesting, educational, historical, completely true, and hysterical all at the same time:
The US standard railroad gauge (width between the two 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 the US railroads were built by English expatriates.
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 used for building wagons which used that wheel spacing.
Okay! 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? The first long distance roads in Europe (and England) were built by Imperial Rome for their legions. The roads have been used ever since. And the ruts in the roads? Roman war chariots first formed the initial ruts, which everyone else had to match for fear of destroying their wagon wheels. Since the chariots were made for (or by) Imperial Rome, they were all alike in the matter of wheel spacing.
The United States standard railroad gauge of 4 feet, 8.5 inches derives from the original specification for an Imperial Roman war chariot. Specifications and bureaucracies live forever. So the next time you are handed a specification and wonder what horse's ass came up with it, you may be exactly right, because the Imperial Roman war chariots were made just wide enough to accommodate the back ends of two war horses. Thus, we have the answer to the original question.
Now the twist to the story . . .
There's an interesting extension to the story about railroad gauges and horses' behinds. When we 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 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 from the factory had to run through a tunnel in the mountains. The SRBs had to fit through that tunnel. The tunnel is slightly wider than the railroad track, and the railroad track is about as wide as two horses' behinds. So, the major 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!” (Holohan, B., 2019).
Written by Bill Holohan, in his X (then Twitter) feed, this essay has been declared coincidence by Snopes. However, I think they miss the point. Mr Holohan is not saying that there is an intentional link between Roman chariots and modern train tracks, but rather an unintentional, rational, real chain of events that leads from one simple event to the next. This is very similar to “the way things are done”, we cannot say why, but it’s the way we do things; in business, in families, in personal life. Sometimes it’s good to examine the why of what we are doing, so we can understand how we got to where we are.
Why matters.
Reference
Holohan, Bill. (2019). The History Behind the US Standard Gauge for Railroad Tracks, Exuperist,09/28/2019.
