How old is the m6

The M6 motorway is the longest motorway in the United Kingdom. It runs from a junction with the M1 near Rugby in central England, passes near Coventry, through Birmingham and near the major cities of Wolverhampton, Stoke-on-Trent, Manchester, Liverpool, and Preston, and on to the north of Carlisle, close to the Scottish border. The three-lane M6, which came to Cumbria in the late s and early s, transformed communications within the county and outside, creating opportunities in relation to tourism and economic development, which had not previously existed.

The route to Scotland is very close to the one chosen by the Romans, except that their road passes to the east of Farlton Knott, the prominent limestone hill a few miles north of Carnforth, while the M6 passes to the west.

For several miles through the Lune Gorge, the motorway and its year old predecessor run parallel to each other. The Roman road is clearly visible from the motorway on the opposite side of the Lune on the western flanks of the Howgill Fells. After about A. Eventually with the coming of mass motoring it was decided that a new road was needed. The Lune Gorge route was chosen as it was easier to engineer, and not so liable to be affected by hill fog and bad visibility.

There are structures on the Lune Gorge section of the motorway of which 77 are bridges or underpasses. Cost studies led to open abutments being selected generally, so that for standard situations overbridges have three or four spans, but most underbridges have single spans. In one case an overbridge carrying a minor road was designed with 3 spans rather than 4, so as to frame a magnificent early view of the approach to the Lune Gorge for North-bound travellers.

Within a length of 2. Less than 40 years since it was built, it's now hard to imagine Cumbria without the motorway. We examine the planning, the construction and the consequences of a road which divided the county in more ways than one. John Hurst. Jim Banks. Hilary Wilson. Jean Hector. Bob Baldwin. View a printable version of this page. For many people, driving through Cumbria on the M6 is a real treat. The Lune Valley, the Pennines, and miles of scenic agricultural land all combine to create one of the most beautiful stretches of motorway in the country.

Building work at Junc. Opening booklets. Carlisle bypass Junction Penrith bypass. Thrimby to Tebay. Tebay to Killington. Killington to Farleton. Farleton to Carnforth. Heart Wood. I have cursed your clogged arteries; I have stared down death in your fast-moving lanes.

I have been given succour by the comfort of your cold, hard shoulder while waiting for help. You are the brightest, the darkest, the best, the worst. You are the first. Hundreds of people gathered on that cold winter day to witness the auspicious event which had been more than 20 years in the making.

Difficult to conceive of today, but before that date, there were no motorways in Britain. They made a celebratory booklet for it. Can you imagine? A souvenir for the opening of a road. But these were interesting times, progressive times, times of change. Perhaps on that December day in there was no heat, white or otherwise, on the wind-swept site of what had once been industrial land and open fields east of Preston, one of the great industrial towns of the North, but the sentiment was similar; the future had arrived.

That very first stretch of motorway ran to a little more than eight miles, from what is now Junction 29, at Bamber Bridge, to Junction 32, which is where the M55 hives off and takes holiday-makers to Blackpool. Prior to the By-Pass opening, the main route through Preston involved negotiating the A6, but increasing populations and car ownership meant the road was rapidly becoming unfit for purpose. Both of those junctions have played a part in my working life, as a young reporter living in Wigan, to the south, but working in Preston.

My first beat at the Lancashire Evening Post was covering the area known since local authority reorganisation in as South Ribble: Leyland, Bamber Bridge, Samlesbury. On clear, still days, having a cigarette in the car park, you could hear the incessant whisper of traffic on the motorway. By the time the stretch opened on 5 December, there had been 3.

This was originally going to be used to form the bankings shielding the motorway from the surrounding areas, but incessant rainfall during construction made this impossible, so a further , tons of earth had to be brought in for that. There were 22 bridges constructed along the stretch, including one that carried the road over the River Ribble. In the original plan had been to widen the A6, but the rapid increase in development either side of the road meant this was impossible, so plans started to be drawn up for a brand new road.

Preliminary investigations into potential routes were interrupted by the war, and when they resumed in the lates the Preston By-Pass was back at the top of the agenda.