Hello - I was pondering the seemingly crazy ways some things are done. Are you doing things because 'We've always done it that way' without questioning if there is a more efficient or effective way of going about it? Then you'll enjoy the logic of this story I found...and where it ends up.

Specs and Bureaucracies live forever!

The US Standard railroad gauge (the distance between the rails) is 4 feet 8.5 inches. That's an exceedingly odd number. Why was that gauge used?
Because that's the way they built them in England, and US railroads were originally designed and built by English expatriates.
Why did the English build them like that? Because the first rail lines were built by the same people who built the pre-railroad tramways, and that's the gauge they used.
Why did ‘they' use that measurement? Because the people who built the tramways used the same jigs and tools that they had used for building wagons.
Why did the wagons use that odd wheel spacing? If they tried to use any other spacing the wagons would break on some of the old, long distance roads.
Why did they break? Because that was the spacing of the old wheel ruts.
So who built these old rutted roads? The first long distance roads in Europe were built by Imperial Rome for the benefit of their legions.
And the ruts? The initial ruts, which everyone else had to match for fear of destroying their wagons, were first made by Roman war chariots. Since the chariots were made for or by Imperial Rome, they were all alike. And thus, we have the answer to the original question.
The United States standard railroad gauge of 4 feet, 8.5 inches derives from the original specification for an Imperial Roman army war chariot.

Specs and Bureaucracies live forever!

So, the next time you are handed a specification and wonder what horse's back end came up with it, you may be exactly right. Because the Imperial Roman chariots were made to be just wide enough to accommodate the back ends of two war horses.
T here's an interesting extension to this story about railroad gauges and horses' behinds. The Space Shuttle has two booster rockets attached to the sides of the main fuel tank. These are the solid rocket boosters, or SRBs. The SRBs are made by Thiokol at a factory in Utah USA. The engineers who designed the SRBs would have preferred to make them fatter, but the SRBs had to be shipped by train from the factory to the launch site.
The railroad line to the factory runs through a tunnel in the mountains. And the SRBs had to fit through that tunnel. The tunnel is only slightly wider than the railroad track. So, a major design feature of what is arguably the world's most advanced transportation system was determined by the width of two horse's behinds!
All of this begs the question, 'Are there any systems or processes used in your business that are in place because of the width of two horses behinds?'