I suspect that most of you will recognize the narrative I'm going to paste in, below. I nabbed it off the web (someplace long forgotten)...and have seen it in a variety of forms over the years. I'd like to print/us it in a book. Problem is, I don't know who/what to cite . . . or if I even need to cite anyone. At this point, I'm treating it as an "Internet Urban Legend" . . . 1) is it? or 2) do you know its source/owner? thanks folks *** There are two booster rockets attached to the side of the main fuel tank on the space shuttles. These solid rocket boosters (SRBs) are made by Morton Thiokol at their factory in Utah. They are the width they are because they have to be shipped by train from the factory to the launch site. The railroad line from the factory has to run through a tunnel in the mountains. The tunnel is slightly wider than the railroad track, and the railroad track is about as wide as two horses behinds. The U.S. standard railroad gauge (distance between the rails) is 4 feet, 8.5 inches. Thats the way they built them in England, and the U.S. railroads were largely designed and built by English expatriates, who had also built the pre-railroad tramways. The tramways were the same gauge because the jigs and tools that were used for building wagons had the same wheel spacing as the tramways any other spacing caused the wagon wheels to break on some of the old, long distance roads in England that spacing matches the spacing of long-standing wheel ruts. The ruts were there because the first long distance roads in Europe (and England) were built by Imperial Rome for their legions. The ruts in the roads, that everyone had to match for fear of destroying their wagon wheels, were first formed by Roman war chariots. Since the chariots were made for (or by) Imperial Rome, they were all alike in the matter of wheel spacing. The U.S. standard railroad gauge of 4 feet, 8.5 inches, then, derives from the original specification for an Imperial Roman war chariot. The Imperial Roman war chariots were made just wide enough to accommodate the back ends of two war horses, or later, the rough width of two space shuttle SRBs. Edward Lee Lamoureux, Ph. D. Associate Professor, Speech Communication and Multimedia Editor, Journal of Communication and Religion Bradley University Peoria IL 61625 ell@bradley.edu http://hilltop.bradley.edu/~ell Fax: 309-677-3446