One of the UK’s strangest little motorways, the A601(M) in Lancashire, has just been downgraded into oblivion.
All the most delightful oddities get straightened out eventually. You could argue that the UK road network had few motorways stranger than the A601(M) - it was, for example, the subject of our first Imperfectly Odd article a few years ago - so perhaps it was inevitable that it couldn’t last forever.
The short version of its history is that it was built as the M6 Lancaster Bypass, making it part of the fourth oldest motorway in the UK.
It then got a single-carriageway extension, making it one of the few single-carriageway motorways and also one of the few to be disrupted by a roundabout part way along. Its number was shared with the A601 Derby Inner Ring Road, a bizarre choice (or an unwitting duplication) for which there was never any explanation. And its eastern terminus was a T-junction where the motorway gave way to a B-road.
Back in 2020, Lancashire County Council, who are responsible for the road, redesignated the single carriageway section as a new B-road, the B6601, removing at a stroke several of its most striking anomalies. This was so that some new commercial premises could be built using the road as their main access.
The writing has been on the wall for the remaining bit of A601(M) for a long time now - there has been talk for years of building a junction part-way along it to service more new commercial development at the northern end of Carnforth.
That project seems to have faltered, but the council is still keen to downgrade the road in order to reduce its ongoing maintenance costs.
In July 2020, a plan was announced that would include demolition of Higher North Road bridge, which carries a minor road over the motorway.
It would have been replaced with a signalised junction. The idea was that the cost of demolishing it, and rebuilding the site as a flat crossroads, would be cheaper than the total cost of maintaining the ageing structure over the next 30 years.
In January this year there was a change of heart, not through nostalgia for the strange little motorway (that would have been our reason for a rethink, of course, but then we’re not paying to maintain it), but because the bridge carries a high pressure gas main and re-siting the pipe would have been far more costly than first imagined.
As a result the calculation has now tipped in favour of keeping the bridge, with maintenance costs over the next 30 years expected to be cheaper overall than demolishing it and installing a new crossroads.
The downgrade is still happening, though, with the Department for Transport providing £9.2m of funding for the necessary alterations. Lancashire County Council propose to dig up and grass over the hard shoulders, reducing the total carriageway width (and the volume of waste water run-off it produces, and the amount of surface to be maintained), and also plan to introduce a new 50mph speed limit, which should reduce wear on the road and permit a less strict maintenance routine.
Ahead of those physical works, the status of the road has to be changed, and that has now happened. SABRE member Solocle spotted the publication of the legal notice in the Gazette, which is the official record of such things: the Lancashire County Council (A601(M) Partial Revocation) Scheme 2022 came into effect on 23 February, from which date the A601(M) ceased to exist.
In its place is now a length of ex-motorway dual carriageway, which has been classified as a short extension of the existing A6070, and a short length of ex-motorway single carriageway, downgraded a couple of years ago, which remains B6601. The signs on the ground have yet to be changed, so for the time being it still looks much as it did, but over the coming months the road will start to look progressively less and less like a motorway.
See you later, A601(M). All the most delightful oddities get straightened out eventually, and you really were one of the oddest.
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