Friday, October 10, 2003
We’ve always done it that way
(This article is compiled from information of unknown origin that I received over the Internet.) The distance between railroad track rails is called the railroad gauge. The U.S. standard railroad gauge is 4 ft 8 ½ in. Now that’s an odd number. Why, you might ask, is the U.S. standard railroad gauge 4 ft 8 ½ in, instead of 5 ft or 4 ½ ft or 1 ½ meters? Why exactly 4 ft 8 ½ in? The simple answer is we’ve always done it that way; that’s how they built them in England, and—for the most part—English...
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