A Lesson in the Importance of Scheduling Regular Compliance Audits.

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.

There was a railroad line from the factory that happened to run through a tunnel in the mountain, and so the SRBs had to fit through that tunnel. Which was slightly wider than the railroad track, which was only 4 feet, 8.5 inches. Standard across the entire US. That's an exceedingly odd number; so why was that gauge used?

Well, because the US copied the way they lay tracks in England, as English engineers build the trains that way. Why? Because the first rail lines were built by the same people who built the wagon tramways, and that's the gauge they used. Because the people who built the tramways used the same jigs and tools that they had used for building wagons and wagon wheels use that spacing.

Which made sense at the time because 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. caused by the wheel ruts in the roads. But who rutted those old roads at exactly 4ft 8in intervals?

Imperial Rome who built the first long distance roads in Europe for their legions to march along. Where Roman war chariots formed the initial ruts. These chariots were mass mproduced in Imperial Rome making the completely arbitrary wheel spacing a standard everywhere.

Think about that the next time someone tells you that a process is there because its, "just how it's done."

(NOTE: I didn't write the original story, it was shared to me and expanded upon by multiple contributors, so I don't know how to attribute the original author; but I found it fun and interesting just the same.)