I recently was sent this interesting story by an Internet friend. Is this true?
“Why did the English people build them like that? Because the first rail lines were built by the same people who built the prerailroad tramways, and that’s the gauge they used.
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“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.
“Specs 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 chariots were made to be just wide enough to accommodate the back ends of two warhorses.”
What about Roman war chariots and rutted roads? Roman “rutways,” many of which were purposely built to standard dimensions, were close to modern railroad tracks in width. For example, the rutways at the buried cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum averaged four-foot-nine center to center, with a gauge of maybe four-foot-six. But there’s no direct connection between Roman rutways and 18th-century tramways. The designers of each were dealing with a similar problem, namely hauling wheeled vehicles behind draft animals. So it’s not surprising they came up with similar results.
