The road that made no sense

It was the UK's only single-carriageway motorway, and twenty years ago it ceased to exist. Why was it so fascinating - and why is it still so fondly remembered today?

You might have noticed the sporadic nature of my posts so far this year. I’d love to post more frequently, but this summer I’m getting married and then going on honeymoon, so you should expect things to stay pretty sporadic until life returns to normal in the autumn. But I’ll keep writing when I can, and I have some posts in the bank for when I’m away, so there’s no need to send a search party after me just yet.

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This is the latest post in my ongoing series Imperfectly Odd¹, exploring strange and unexpected stories from the UK road network. This time we’re marking an anniversary: twenty years since the loss of one of the UK’s weirdest roads, even though it’s still there and you can still drive it today. And for me, this one is personal.

The deceptive thing about the UK’s road network is that it looks like there is order. But the people who build, maintain and make decisions about our roads don’t always know about the “right” way of doing things, and if they do know, they sometimes decide to do something else anyway. The result are oddities, anomalies, exceptions to the rule - things to celebrate, puzzle over and debate.

Back in the early 2000s, when UK road geeks first started finding each other online, one anomaly dominated discussion, sparking more debate than any other. It was the UK’s only single-carriageway motorway, the A6144(M) Carrington Spur. I can’t tell you how much we loved (and loved to hate) that strange little road.

Try to imagine a world in which enthusiasts² travel to the suburbs of Greater Manchester to have their picture taken with the “A6144(M)” road sign. Imagine not just one of them, but several - and all the resulting photos, websites, roadtrip videos and excitable forum posts. Imagine that mania being sustained for a period of years. Imagine that, and you might begin to appreciate the strange pull that this road had.

Yes, this is your author, completing his pilgrimage to Carrington on 18 October 2003. Wish I still had that t-shirt.

What was so odd about the A6144(M)?

The A6144(M) was a road that broke all the rules. Nothing about it seemed to make sense.

It was a motorway, in that it was constructed using the legal powers for a motorway scheme. It was subject to motorway regulations, it had blue motorway signs and it had a motorway number³. On a map it was marked with the same thick blue line as the M1 and the M6. It was part of the UK’s motorway network.

Wow, look at that big wide motorway that goes to Carrington!

It was also a single carriageway road, so it had just one lane each way separated by white lines. It had no interchanges and no hard shoulders - though it did have two emergency lay-bys, complete with telephones to call for help. It started at a roundabout, which was only slightly larger than a dustbin lid, and finished a short distance away at a signal-controlled T-junction.

There was, in other words, nothing about it that would lead you to think that it was a motorway, or that it could ever be mistaken for one, except for the signs that proclaimed it to be so, and the road atlas tucked into the pocket behind your driver’s seat, which cheerfully marked it as one of the UK’s top-tier highways.

It had repeated “two way traffic” warning signs throughout its length, because of the understandable fear that drivers would see the motorway signs and think they could freely overtake in the other lane.

The A6144(M) as it appeared on the ground - yes, this was a motorway, and it set our hearts alight.

Thanks to the way that English law deals with speed limits, its status meant that the usual 60mph limit for single-carriageway roads didn’t apply to it. Instead you could do a perfectly legal 70mph on it, though not for long; at that speed you’d cover the whole motorway end-to-end in 61 seconds.

Its disregard for the normal way of doing things even extended to its number, if you really want to get into the weeds. “A6144(M)” implies a section of the A6144 that is classified as a motorway, but this was not a section of A6144: it branched off that road and was entirely separate to it⁴. (The A6144 itself is also incorrectly numbered, lying entirely west of the A6, so it should have a number beginning with a 5, though that really was the least of anyone’s worries.)

This litany of peculiarities was what drove the fascination with the A6144(M) - a road that claimed to be one thing but was plainly another. It was too narrow, too short and too unimportant to belong with its supposed peers; it had an impossible speed limit and the wrong road number. But this was not a deliberate attempt to create something strange.

Getting it right by doing it wrong

The Carrington Spur opened to traffic in 1987, part of a bigger scheme to widen and improve what was then the M63 around the west side of Manchester. Its job was to link the the chemical works near Carrington to the motorway network, letting heavy goods vehicles avoid a journey through Sale on the A6144.

A single carriageway road was sufficient for that purpose, branching off the existing A6144 just west of the town. At the eastern end, it met the M63 (today’s M60 junction 8) at a dumbbell junction - two very small roundabouts, one each side of the motorway, linking to a set of sliproads. It was a very simple and affordable project.

However, the roundabouts at the new interchange were so compact that large vehicles wouldn’t be able to turn around. Left and right turns would be OK, but u-turns would be impossible, so a theoretical learner driver, driving a sufficiently large vehicle, would not be able to u-turn and avoid joining the motorway.

A responsible highway engineer would not put a learner driver in that position, no matter how theoretical they may be. The solution was to extend motorway restrictions back to a point where non-motorway traffic could safely escape. That is what its designers did, starting restrictions at the traffic lights west of Sale, and turning the whole new spur into a motorway.

It would have cost far more to make the roundabouts bigger, or to build the new spur as a full motorway with dual carriageways and hard shoulders to match its new classification. The cost wouldn’t be justified. Instead, a single carriageway motorway met all the requirements, and in truth, there was (and is) no reason why one cannot exist.

There was an extra benefit too, since the new bypass was marked far more prominently on maps than any other road around it. This positive indication of the fastest way between Carrington and the motorway gave every encouragement for motorists to divert from the old route through Sale.

Far from making no sense, the A6144(M) was extremely sensible: a cost-effective and pragmatic bit of design. It was just completely unlike anything else, which made it a magnet for people with a certain geeky mindset. People like me.

A short road with a sudden end

All good things must come to an end. In the mid-2000s, work was underway to widen the M60 around the west side of Manchester again. To squeeze the wider motorway through junction 8, the interchange had to be reconstructed.

Rather than close the junction, demolish the one existing bridge, and replace it in-situ, new bridges were built alongside and the original demolished once they had opened to traffic. The remodelled junction had just one big roundabout, a design chosen simply to minimise disruption during the construction period - but this presented an opportunity.

With the big roundabout in place, vehicles of any size could reach the end of the Carrington Spur and turn around. The reason for the spur to be a motorway had evaporated.

Trafford Borough Council, who maintained it, had spent 19 years obtaining special permits and paperwork for their crews to operate on motorways just so they could clear litter and change lightbulbs on this one mile of road. They wasted no time in submitting the paperwork to revoke motorway restrictions⁵.

On Wednesday 24 May 2006, the A6144(M) was closed overnight for maintenance works. When it re-opened it wasn’t a motorway any more.

The last moments of the A6144(M), seen at 9.42pm on 24 May 2006. Workers in hi-viz are about to close the road to allow its motorway signs to be removed.

Naturally, this event sent shockwaves through online gatherings of transport geeks. Some people petitioned Trafford Borough Council not to do it. Many people made “final visits” to see the motorway before it disappeared. Me? I actually turned up on the night of the closure with another web forum regular called “Squadgy” to watch it being closed.

The same scene just after noon the next day, with the motorway sign gone and a series of new restrictions in force.

On the spur of the moment

I returned the next day, this time with fellow SABRE forum member Peter Edwardson⁶, to see the newly demoted road. Having spoken to the hi-viz work crew the night before, I’d obtained the phone number of their boss, along with a large number of confused looks. I called and left a voicemail message, and while we waited for him to phone back we ate terrible industrial estate cheeseburgers from a greasy takeaway van parked around the corner.

When the call came, the manager of the traffic sign contractor was no less bemused than his staff, but he told me where the vans were now parked - inside a compound for the M60 widening works - and that I could take whatever I wanted as long as it was today, since the rest would go for scrap by nightfall.

Needless to say, we went straight there and retrieved a series of holy relics from the back of their van⁷.

Moving aside an enormous blue “RIVER MERSEY” sign to find the good stuff, on the back of a van somewhere in Greater Manchester.

Since then the A6144(M) sign has performed a number of roles in its new domestic setting, becoming a wall hanging, a free-standing art installation and a coffee table. It has also regularly attended gatherings of road enthusiasts, where it usually proves far more popular than me. Everyone wants a picture with the A6144(M) sign.

Various outings for the A6144(M)'s sign, including (left) at the 50th anniversary of the opening of Watford Gap Services.

Twenty years on

Last week saw the 20th anniversary of the A6144(M) losing its motorway status and becoming a perfectly ordinary road. It has now been gone for longer than it was ever there.

I doubt that most people using it twenty years ago noticed the difference, aside from its new speed limit; since it vanished, discussion about it quickly died down. There’s now a whole generation of transport enthusiasts who aren’t old enough to recall it. But it turns out, to my surprise, people do remember. Not only does it show up in Show Me A Sign Bryn’s latest video, there’s also now A6144(M) merch courtesy of UK Roads and Transport.

Being in the mood to celebrate the twentieth anniversary myself, I obviously rushed to order my sticker and fridge magnet set, and immediately attached the magnet to the original sign⁸.

Twenty years on, you can buy a replica of this sign to stick on your fridge, or on any motorway signs you might keep around the house.

You might have read all this and wondered what all the fuss was about. The A6144(M) didn’t matter a great deal when it existed, and the fact it disappeared twenty years ago matters even less, especially when you consider that the road is still actually there, just with signs of a different colour.

I would prefer to see it differently. Exceptions to the rule are more than just curiosities - they can often teach us something useful. Often transport planning is tied up in the design manual, the accepted standard, the usual way of doing things, and often that’s entirely appropriate. But sometimes you get a better answer by being a bit more pragmatic. Sometimes, in fact, if you take a closer look at something that appears to make no sense, it might be entirely sensible.

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Picture credits

• Map extract is taken from the AA Road Atlas of Great Britain (2005), which I’m delighted to say had my name in it because I supplied a load of motorway trivia for the pages at the front - but sadly no mention of the A6144(M).

• Photographs of the A6144(M) sign at various SABRE outings appear courtesy of Paul Martin.

1. Past Imperfectly Odd outings, back on the old blog:

• The A601(M)

• Hardwick Roundabout

• The Strensham Loop

• Batheaston Bypass

2. Not all of them were excitable teenagers, either. Let’s not forget the grown men who persuaded their families that their trip to the Trafford Centre would be “quicker” if they took a “shortcut” via this strange little road near Carrington.

3. An “(M)” suffix can turn an A-road number into a motorway number in the UK, in what is probably the world’s weirdest and most punctuation-heavy road classification.

4. We could also talk about the length of its number. Shorter numbers are meant to represent more important roads, so a motorway with four digits is an oxymoron. Only three motorways have ever had four-digit numbers; the others were the short-lived A6127(M), which is now the A167(M) in Newcastle, and the current A1077(M), which is thought to be a temporary designation and which is arguably the successor to the Carrington Spur as the UK’s weirdest motorway.

5. One person connected to the council confirmed the news, in a comment on road geek haven Pathetic Motorways, by saying “we are going to put the pathetic little thing out of its misery”. There was no love for the A6144(M) at Trafford Borough Council.

6. Peter was better known in other corners of the internet as the Pub Curmudgeon. He very sadly passed away late last year.

7. You can see a gallery of pictures from the rescue mission over on the website.

8. The sign is made of aluminium, so I used sellotape, but that’s not the point.