Since I was a kid I’ve heard about the RR guage being based on the Roman chariots, and I’ve always wondered why it was important to make the gauge the same as the Romans did, why the Romans thought it important to standardize the wheel spacing, and how we knew what the spacing was. In recent years, I have heard about what tatans mentioned, that they had raised walkways crossing the roads and built gaps in them for the wheels to pass. This answers my last two questions, but it still doesn’t explain why Stephenson or any other builders would care what the Romans did. It’s an interesting story to tell kids, though.
As far as horses’ butts, I don’t see why the wheel spacing matters much. As long as the harness and related gear fits the horse(s), the wheels can be any spacing as long as it’s not so narrow as to be unstable or so wide that it restricts mobility. I kinda think the choice of RR gauge was pretty much arbitrary, and if it was based on mining carts, then that was pretty much arbitrary.
George Stephenson was a mechanic, an unlettered man. I doubt very much he was thinking about Roman Chariots. He had worked around mines all of his life. I suspect he choose the most common and practical gauge he knew in his own experience.
For many years the British had used draft animals to haul coal cars on rails from the mine to the port. However, due to poor crops oats were becoming expensive. Also, draft animals had to be fed and cared for whether they worked or not and there had to be employees to handle the draft animals. The mine owners were looking to cut costs. By 1800 steam pumping engines were well known to them but those engines were too big and heavy to use on a locomotive. Boulton and Watt produced the best steam engines of the day but those were low pressure engines. Different people began to experiment with higher pressures. I think Richard Trevethick was the first and there were others. When Stephenson won at the Rainhill Trials he became the the leading manufacturer of steam locomotives in Britain.
The story is not that Stevenson (or anyone associated with the building of what, today, we call RailRoads)picked the gauge based on Roman Chariots, but that those, like him, relied on already present trackage laid for use in mining and horse drawn carriage ways and how THOSE chose the distance between the rails. The whole idea is that it was pre-determined by the spacing necessary to get the wheels out of the way of the horses hooves and provide a stable chariot for the Romans.
But this was discussed (and cussed and diss’d) a long time ago on a forum and someone from England researched the remaining Rom
The photos of several teams of draft horses hitched to wagons on the webpage linked below - Eastern Connecticut Draft Horse Association’s “Draft Horse Breeds” - support my contention that the width of the horses’ butts had nothing to do with the gage of the wheels or runners - for any combination of horses, it could be almost any dimension other than 4 ft. 8-1/2 inches:
Instead, the wheels were established at that gage most likely for ancient historical and precedential reasons - i.e., “That’s how it’s always been, so we can’t change it now”.
When I first heard the story about standard gage originating with the Roman chariots, there was no mention of any connection with horse butts. I think that is a more recent concoction just to add a little humor and perhaps ridicule. We like to think of railroad standard gage as a vaunted achievement built on great engineering deliberation, so there is a smug sense of humorous put-down to say it was based on the width of a horse’s “A.”
First - to drop a couple of facts into the discussion - don’t you hate it when somebody does that?
By Roman times the war chariot was as obsolete as the battlecruiser is today. Alexander the Great worked out the pike pocket maneuver, and the effectiveness of the chariot as a weapon promptly dropped to a close approximation of zero. Roman chariots were racing and sports vehicles, and probably were about as sandardized as Indy cars were just after WWI.
The colliery where Stephenson worked used a track gauge of four feet, eight inches. Stephenson retained the wheel/axle geometry, but eased the gauge by 1/2 inch since the proposed passenger and goods wagons would be longer than mine carts and he wanted to avoid flange binding.
There really were quite a few horse-drawn vehicles designed to standard gauge - but mostly because that was the gauge those city streetcar lines had already adopted.
Why did everyone except Brunel jump on the 1435mm gauge bandwagon? They all believed in that old mechanic’s axiom, "If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it."
(So did the Japanese engineers who built the Shinkansen - to the same gauge.)
There have been plenty of embellishments to the story, but including the size of the horse is not so recent. Albeit, it is probably, as you say, just to add humor and ridicule. It is a part of the story I have seen in books from the 1890’s. The number of horses has varied from one to three (obviously, some of those that retell the story have no idea what the width of a horse is) based on the retellers concept of a Roman chariot.
The most recent embellishment I have seen is that the size of the rocket boosters for the Space Shuttle was determined by the size of a horse’s back side. Seems (according to the story) that the boosters needed to be shipped by rail and there are tunnels on the route. Such that the boosters were limited in size to fit the tunnels, the tunnels were bored to fit the track, and the track was dimensioned based on the Roman horse size, thus the size of the booster rockets relate back to the size of the Roman horse.
ah the resion that we Drive on the left apparently is because of this Jousting knights with their lances under their right arm naturally passed on each other’s right, and if you passed a stranger on the road you walked on the left to ensure that your protective sword arm was between yourself and him.
much like the distance between the two side in the houses of Parliament is two swords leanths apart
Something I was never taught at school in my Latin course (and only recently discovered on one of the History Channel programmes) was that the Romans were very skilled at pre-fabricating all the paraphernalia they would undoubedly need when planning an invasion such as that of Britain. I undestand they went as far as pre-fabricating the wooden walls they’d need for a quick build fort on a defensive position, and it follows that they might well bring over their own pre-fabricated wagons to carry their war materiel in the support of the campaign.
History is invariably created by the victors, so the dimensions of their standardised wagons might have been adopted by the native cartwrights and wainwrights in Britain at that time (certainly if they knew what would be best for them !! ).
In this way, a standard gauge for wagons in England, Scotland, and Wales, of around 5 feet from the outside of one wheel to the outside of the other might have come about.
Much later, plateways were constructed, whereby lengths of angle iron were laid on stone blocks, such that the horizontal section bore the weight and the vertical section kept the wagon wheels from straying from the “track” thus bringing about a gauge of around 56 inches when those wagon wheel were later built with a fange on the inner side.
Sorry, in my rush to post the above, I omitted that the Romans’ pre-fabrication would have gone hand in hand with standardisation of dimesnions, materials etc .