Page "Standard gauge" Paragraph 5

A popular legend, which has been around since at least 1937, traces the origin of the 4 ft 8½ in gauge even further back than the coalfields of northern England, pointing to the evidence of rutted roads marked by chariot wheels dating from the Roman Empire.

Snopes categorized this legend as false but commented that “... it is perhaps more fairly labeled as ' True, but for trivial and unremarkable reasons.

'" The historical tendency to place the wheels of horse-drawn vehicles approximately apart probably derives from the width needed to fit a carthorse in between the shafts.

In addition, while road-traveling vehicles are typically measured from the outermost portions of the wheel rims ( and there is some evidence that the first railroads were measured in this way as well ), it became apparent that for vehicles travelling on rails, it was better to have the wheel flanges located inside the rails, and thus the distance measured on the inside of the wheels ( and, by extension, the inside faces of the rail heads ) was the important one.