One of the discussion questions in our Wild Goose Chase this past Sunday was, “Have you been stuck in a rut lately?” Later in the day while perusing through a book entitled, “Cat and Dog Theology,” I read with great interest how the distance between the rails of all railroads in the US came to be four feet, eight and a half inches.

It seems that English engineers helped to build US railroads according to the pattern used in England. So, how did they know to do this? Because the engineers who built the first railways in England had built the rails for the tramways that preceded the railroad. And the engineers who built the tramways used the distance between wagon wheels, which preceded the tramways. So why did the engineers who built the wagons use four feet, eight and a half inches for the distance between wagon wheels? Because this was the spacing between wheel ruts in the road.

The authors of the book, Bob Sjogren and Gerald Robison, went on to ask, “Who put the ruts in the roads?” They discovered the roads in England had been built by the Romans, and the Romans built their roads to accommodate their war chariots. And you guessed it: the distance between the wheels of the Roman war chariots was four feet, eight and a half inches.

But why that distance? The authors continued. It seems this distance was the same distance as “the back ends of two warhorses.” And the Roman war chariots all used two war horses. There’s another pretty unique consequence to all of this. It’s almost like a Paul Harvey’s, “The rest of the story.”

On the sides of each space shuttle are two big booster rockets, full of fuel to assist in takeoff. Apparently, the engineers at the manufacturing company based in Utah wanted these solid rocket boosters to be a bit bigger but the boosters had to fit through a rail tunnel in the mountains for delivery to the launch site. The tunnel was only a bit wider than the railroad track. Remember how wide the rail track was? Four feet, eight and a half inches, or about the same as the back end of two Roman war horses.

Who would have guessed that ruts from Roman war chariots in ancient England would have had such a great affect on space travel?

Perhaps the moral of the story ought to be, “Beware of ruts, you may be following the back end of a couple of horses.”

Have a Happy Thanksgiving!