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A74
The Glasgow to Carlisle Road
The A74 was formerly the main trunk road between Glasgow and Carlisle, running via Hamilton, Lesmahagow, Abington, Lockerbie and Gretna Green. Starting in the 1920s, not long after the creation of road numbers themselves, work commenced on upgrading the route between Blackwood and Carlisle to an eventual dual carriageway standard. By 1973 this was completed providing approximately 60 miles of all purpose dualled road between Carlisle and Draffan linking the M74 and M6 motorways.
Due to a rising collision rate and the increasingly outdated design standards of parts of the corridor as highway design standards evolved, work began in 1987 to upgrade the route to motorway standard within Scotland. This was completed in 1999 with the final section between Gretna and Carlisle under the auspices of English trunk road agencies being completed on 5th December 2008, opening on the 50th anniversary of the opening of the M6 Preston Bypass.
Route History
The A74 route corridor has been in use since Roman times as the main route into Scotland from Northern England. At the beginning of the 19th Century, Thomas Telford constructed a greatly improved route running through the major settlements and building several bridges, many of which are still standing in use today. This work was completed between 1815 and 1825 which saw 95 miles of new road built. In 1922 the Glasgow - Carlisle route had been numbered as A74 and following this several improvements were undertaken to make the route suitable for high-speed motor traffic.
A dual carriageway diversion and bridge was built at Lesmahagow in 1938, while another short dualled section and new Telford Bridge was constructed over the River Clyde. Another early short stretch was built to the south of Johnstonebridge. A section of dual carriageway between Lesmahagow and Newfield Inn began construction in 1939 but the outbreak of World War II and subsequent financial pressures delayed any considerable further development.
Work began in 1957 to complete the dualling of the remainder of the road between Carlisle and Glasgow which became the first major modern trunk road project to be built in Scotland. This was announced in February 1955 which also announced a raft of projects and additional funding towards projects such as the Clyde Tunnel, Forth Road Bridge, Crofters Counties Schemes and the dualling of the A80 between Glasgow and Stirling.
Due to the urban built up nature of the route at Larkhall & Uddingston, it was decided to construct a band new route bypassing these areas, which would become the M74 motorway. South of Blackwood it was decided to upgrade the remainder of the single carriageway sections to all-purpose dual carriageway and provide bypasses at all the major settlements, totalling a length of 60 miles of new dualled road. For more information on the M74 Hamilton Bypass, check out the M74 Hamilton Bypass page.
Engineering design of the route was undertaken by the Lanark and Dumfries County Councils with Consulting Engineers Babtie Shaw & Morton designing 20 miles of the route in Lanarkshire. The existing pre-war dual carriageways at Telford Bridge and Johnstonebridge were reconstructed as part of this work to bring them up to modern standards however the Lesmahagow section was not improved and remains to this day a relic of early dual carriageway design.
Grade separated junctions were built at Abington for the A73, Beattock for the A701, Lockerbie for the A709, Ecclefechan, Kirkpatrick Fleming, and Gretna for the A75. The remainder of the junctions were at-grade crossings which involved right turns in the central reservation.
The more challenging section to improve was the Beattock Summit section where large quantities of Peat and rock were removed. Due to the landscape at Harthope north of where the West Coast Mainline crosses the route, the carriageways were both horizontally and vertically separated for a short distance with each carriageway regraded to reduce the steep gradients up to Beattock Summit (313m). Several new bridges were constructed over the Poniel water, Duneaton Water, Evan Water and the Water of Milk with a total of five new bridges built over the West Coast mainline, several of which had extensive skew angles creating a tunnel-like effect for the railway below.
The final section to open in Lanarkshire was between Hectors Bridge and the Lanarkshire/Dumfries County Boundary on 26th March 1965, and was officially opened by Dr J. Dickson Mabon, Joint Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for Scotland.
The final section to open in Dumfriesshire was the Gretna Diversion, jointly opened on 4th May 1973 by Lord Polwarth, Minister for State at the Scottish Office and Mr Keith Speed, Parliamentary under Secretary of State at the Department of the Environment. This opening completed a modern highway link from Glasgow to London and finally linked Scotland to the M6 which had been completed in full between Rugby and Carlisle the previous year. The total cost of the A74 dualling project was around £38 million.
A74 Improvements Timeline
Contract
Opening Date
Blackwood Bypass
December 1963
Crawford and Abington Bypass
9th March 1962
Hectors Bridge to County Boundary
26th March 1965
Lockerbie Diversion
17th July 1964
Gretna Bypass
4th March 1973
Sections of the route completed before the publication of the 1964 Traffic Signs Regulations and General Directions featured experimental direction signs inspired by the Anderson Committee for Motorway Signs as the new high-speed road would not be appropriate to be signed with small direction signs from the 1950s. These were soon replaced by modern equivalents towards the later end of the 1960s.
During the early 1970s as traffic volumes rose, there was an increase in serious and fatal collisions along the route and further improvements to the A74 were demanded of, but were initially resisted by, the Scottish Office. An initial study into the route was carried out in March 1976 looking at the layout of the road, horizontal curves, forward visibility, and general design standards. It found a considerable number of locations where the road did not meet modern standards for a 70mph dual carriageway with many sections being more akin to those expected of a 50mph road instead. These lower design specifications would prove to be a problem that could not be ignored for much longer.
Because of this review, remedial work was carried out in the 1970s & 1980s to reprofile many of the curves, add hard strips (1 metre wide) for emergency use, and reconstruct several sections of the A74 pavement which was rapidly wearing out due to the rising number of heavy goods vehicles using the road and their loading upon older surfacing technology. Gaps in the central reservation were closed off where practical and a central crash barrier was installed for the entire length to reduce the risk of crossover incidents. However, such roadworks created periods of severe congestion, particularly during the busy summer months, and affected the overall reliability of the route causing further demands for improvements to ensure the Central Belt remained economically supported by an appropriate road network.
The stretch of the road passing Lesmahagow was not improved to modern standards during the upgrade in the 1960s, and as a result there were several safety concerns particularly where there were sharp bends and steep gradients either side of the bridge over the River Nethan further exacerbated by a narrow central reservation. By the early 1970s, plans were developed to extend the motorway southwards from Draffan to Millbank, fully bypassing the pre-war section of dual carriageway through Lesmahagow. Two construction contracts were ultimately let, Draffan to Douglas, completed in October 1986 and Douglas to Millbank, opening in November 1987. These were each constructed as dual two-lane motorway.
In 1987 following political promises to resolve the increasing concerns about the safety of the road during that year’s election campaigning, the Scottish Office confirmed that the remaining sections of A74 between Millbank and Gretna would be upgraded to motorway. In November 1988, an addition £300m of funding was given to the project. Three design contracts were let shortly afterwards to Babtie, Shaw & Morton, Scott Wilson Kirkpatrick and W.A. Fairhurst. The scheme was “fast tracked” with route selection, contract preparation and detailed design undertaken simultaneously.
The first contract taken forward, from Millbank to Nether Abington, opened just four years later in November 1991, entirely offline from the existing A74 and as dual three lanes. The fast pace continued, and by late 1999, the entire A74 south from Abington to Gretna had been upgraded to dual three-lane motorway. Many schemes won civil engineering awards for their innovation and design which had to contend with the imposing beauty of the southern uplands and thread its way through valleys and over bleak moorland.
On 21st December 1988, a section of the A74 was heavily damaged when Pan Am Flight 103 was destroyed in mid-air by a terrorist attack. The fuselage and fuel tanks fell onto residential properties on Sherwood Crescent adjacent to the road, causing a huge explosion and leaving a large crater on the southbound carriageway. Eleven people died on Sherwood Crescent and several people were injured on the A74 as cars were destroyed in the explosion. Aerial photographs of the devastation when daylight broke on 22nd December became a defining image of the tragedy, and an emergency contraflow on the undamaged northbound carriageway was hastily set up so through traffic did not have to travel through the town hampering the rescue and recovery efforts that took place in the following days.
In 1994, the motorway was opened to the west of the existing dual carriageway and the location of the tragedy is unrecognisable today with the current B7076 screened from the memorial garden on Sherwood Crescent by a tall row of trees.
The upgrade to motorway resulted in the eventual downgrading of most of the dual carriageway to an all-purpose single carriageway known as the B7076 between Gretna and Abington, and the B7078 from Abington to Draffan. Where the new motorway was constructed offline, one carriageway of the existing dual carriageway was converted into a cycle path which forms Route 74 of the National Cycle Network. Where the dual carriageway was widened online to motorway standards, a new single carriageway was built alongside with the most notable length of this being between Beattock and Harthope where this road runs alongside the West Coast Mainline a considerable distance away from the old dual carriageway.
The only surviving dual carriageway lengths of the former A74 are now the short section running past Happendon Services between Junctions 11 and 12 of the M74 and the approaches to the bridge across the Nethan at Lesmahagow just south of Junction 10. These sections lack central barriers, hard strips, and are representative of how the route looked before the safety upgrades began to be carried out. A longer section of dual carriageway from Junction 11 to Lesmahagow was removed in 2022 and was the final section to be completed.
Upgrading the stretch of A74 in England between Gretna and Carlisle, despite being approved in 1995, was delayed following the 1997 General Election due to political prioritisation moving away from major new road projects leaving a lower standard section of dual carriageway stretching 6 miles between the two motorways. Despite this delay, two factors demonstrated the need to resolve this so-called “Cumberland Gap”. The first was the deterioration of the Mossband Viaduct, which was at risk of needing weight restrictions which would be intolerable. Orders were written for the replacement of the viaduct regardless of any motorway plans which were being redrawn following a 1999 review of the approved scheme.
The second was events on 22nd December 2004 when a fatal collision involving vehicles transporting hazardous materials near the Mossband Viaduct closed the road for several days immediately before Christmas with severe disruption reported across northern Cumbria and southern Dumfries & Galloway as traffic was forced to divert via the A7 and A6071 through Longtown.
In 2005, a scheme to upgrade the dual carriageway online was approved and work started in July 2006. Apart from the Mossband Viaduct, which was completely replaced, nearly all structures from the original dualling were retained which gives this section a unique ‘old and new’ aesthetic the Scottish section of the motorway upgrade lacks.
The “Cumberland Gap” was opened as M6 on 5th December 2008, exactly 50 years after the opening of the Preston Bypass, the UKs first Motorway. This section was numbered as a northern extension of the M6, which ends at the A6071 interchange just before the border. The original start of motorway sign from 1992 at Gretna still stands just north of Junction 45 to mark the change of route number to A74(M).
The A74 now runs for just 7 miles between Govan and Maryville and is non-primary.
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This article was first published in December 2024. With very special thanks to Bryn Buck.