the mystery of the m67, part of pathetic motorways.

since i’ve moved here it’s always seemed a bit odd that you can zoom out east of manchester on the m67, signposted sheffield, only to get thrown off (generally after sitting in a large traffic bottleneck for a long time) onto a really twisty a roads to actually cross across the spine of the country towards sheffield. i’m not really surprised to find out that the road wasn’t supposed to finish there and that there was a grand plan to connect the road all the way over to the m1. by the looks of the maps it was intended to be a southern alternative to the m62 and would use old railway tunnels for one carriageway.

i sort of wish they’d finished this as it would have saved me many late night twists down the a628 home. having a motorway junction that i could head west on at the flouch hotel would be really great from a speed point of view. on the other hand it’s probably not so good from a pretty countryside point of view and would have affected the area i live in so that it wouldn’t be how it is today if it had better access to the motorway network.

i don’t know whether it was the fact that the motorway would run through the edge of the peak district national park that did for this motorway or the cost of getting through that landscape. another motorway website points out:

it was probably dropped when it was realised that putting a motorway through an old rail tunnel was a “distinctly crap idea”.

i have learnt today that c roads shouldn’t ever appear on road signs (but i follow the sign for the c577 to scholes all the time) but i’ve failed to find out why some roads cling onto being a brackets m roads rather than becoming fully fledged motorways with m numbers.