Food for Thought . . .Why 143.5???

Interesting passage:

``I went to a train station today and learned that the distance between railway tracks is always 143.5 centimeters, or 4 feet 8 1/2 inches. Why this absurd measurement? ...well, when they build the first train carriages, they used the same tools as they had for building horse-drawn carriages. And why that distance between the wheels on carriages? Because that was the width of the old roads along which the carriages had to travel. And who decides that roads whould be that width?

Well, suddently, we are plunged back into the distant past. It was the Romans, the first great road builders, who decided to make their roads that width . And why? Because their war chariots were pulled by two horses, and when placed side by side, the horses they used at the time took up 143.5 centimeters.....so the distance between the tracks I saw today, used by our state-of-the-art high-speed trains, was determined by the Romans.

When people went to the United tates and started builing railways there, it didn´t occur to them to change the width and so it stayed as it was. This even affected the building of space shuttles. American engineers thought the fuel tanks should be wider, but the tanks were built in Utah and had to be transported by train to the Space Center in Florida, and the tunnels couldn´t take anything wider than guess what . . . 143.5 centimeters. And so they had to accept the measurent that the Romans had decided was the ideal. ´´