The standard distance between railroad rails in the United States is 4 feet, 8.5 inches. What a strange number!

Why is it that particular distance? Because that’s the width of the tracks in England, and English emigrants influenced the design of U.S.A. railroads.

Why did the British place the rails exactly that far apart? Because the first railway lines were built with the same spacing they had used for building wagons.

Why did wagons have exactly that distance between their wheels? Well, if they tried to use any other spacing, the wagon wheels would break on some of the old, long distance roads in England, because that’s the spacing of the wheel ruts.

Who built those old, rutted roads? Imperial Rome built the first long distance roads in Europe for their legions, including roads in England. The United States railroads are influenced from the original specifications of a Roman war chariot!

But the influence carries even further. The NASA space shuttle used two big solid booster rockets attached to the sides of the main fuel tank. The engineers who designed those boosters would have preferred to make them larger, but they had to be shipped by train from the factory to the launch site. And the railroad line from the factory happens to run through a tunnel in the mountains that is only slightly wider than the railroad track. Ultimately, a major space shuttle design feature of the world’s most advanced transportation system was determined over two thousand years ago.

Two thousand years ago, our Lord Jesus Christ laid down the tracks that we still follow today. On the one hand, those tracks lead through the tunnel of death straight through the gates of heaven to a new creation. On the other hand, they are tracks to be followed even during this life and rightly should influence our daily decisions even though we might want to build something different. May we always follow those tracks—not as old, obsolete ruts, but as the golden Way of truth and life.