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The M62You are in: Bradford and West Yorkshire > Places > The M62 > Motorway madness? Motorway madness?If it wasn't for a couple of rampant rams and the toss of a coin, the history of the M62 could've been very different! We've been taking a look back at the origins of West Yorkshire's very own 'mountain motorway'...and found some startling facts!  It's probably hard to believe as you zip along the M62 in air conditioned comfort that this road didn't even exist so very long ago! But, just four decades back there was very little here besides sheep, moorland and more sheep. Plenty of sheep! It was going to be quite some task to join the White Rose and Red Rose counties together with landscape like this contend with, but work began in earnest in 1966 to build this historic link. Before that, though, was the issue of what this road was actually going to be called. On the Yorkshire side, obviously WE wanted it to be called the Yorkshire-Lancashire Motorway; on the other side they understandably wanted it to be known as the Lancashire-Yorkshire Motorway. Which was it to be? There was only one way to solve the problem: the county surveyors, Drake and Lovell, stood on the border, tossed a coin and this new road became officially known as the Lancashire-Yorkshire Motorway. Win some, lose some...  Building the M62 was no easy job! And so construction began though not without incident according to Geoffrey Hunter who was the Chief Resident Engineer on the project. He says one of the big early problems was sheep: there were thousands of them on the moorland in the area where the work was taking place and they needed to be kept out at all costs. Cue two rampant rams: "How high do you determine that a sheep can actually jump? Someone came up with the bright idea of putting a couple of rams in a pen with a couple of sheep 'on heat' - or whatever the correct expression is! A pen was built with two sheep inside and the rams were, er, anxious to get at them. In fact they were quite frantic. Incremental heights were put on the fence in this compound and it eventually got up to a height where the sheep couldn't scramble over." It wasn't just the sheep causing problems. A horse had been hired to help with the construction of this bit of the M62 because there were fears that the heavy vehicles would sink in the peat bog. On the first day, the horse towed a sledge of tools onto the squashy moorland and that, says Geoffrey, is when things started going wrong: "It worked well for the first 30 to 40 metres but suddenly the horse went down. All four legs penetrated the peat and that presented one colossal dilemma. The horse was sticking and sinking in this peat. They didn't want the horse to vanish so the men literally ended up putting a sledge on either side of the horse, erecting an 'A'-frame over the horse, digging around its belly, putting a sling underneath it and lifting it up out of the suction of the peat. The story ends quite happily with the horse being dragged back to the road by the men on the sledges which the horse should have towed across the moors. That sort of encapsulates the type of problems encountered!"
Once these early difficulties were sorted out, the new road began to take shape. It took some time, though, before this trans-Pennine section of the M62 was ready to be officially opened by the Queen in spring 1971. It was worth it, though, as it's now seen as a magnificent achievement. As Geoffrey Hunter points out, it has many claims to fame: "It has the longest fixed arch in the northern hemisphere. It's got the only bridge - the Pennine Way footbridge - built in the third dimension. It goes through the deepest peat bog of any motorway in the UK: 700 million tons of peat had to be excavated and disposed of. It's got the highest rock-filled dam in the country [Scammonden]. And it's the highest motorway in the country - 1222 feet above sea level - and hasn't been beaten to this day." Not bad for a road that started off with the toss of a coin, over-enthusiastic sheep and a disappearing horse! That was the past, what about the future for the M62? Will it all be hovercars and stress-free journeys? The BBC's Spencer Stokes has been asking the people in the know to find out more. Listen to his findings by clicking on the link below! Help playing audio/video Feature based on interviews carried out by BBC Radio Leeds' Spencer Stokes. Find out more from Spencer by clicking on the audio links at the top right of this page.last updated: 17/04/2008 at 11:40 You are in: Bradford and West Yorkshire > Places > The M62 > Motorway madness? [an error occurred while processing this directive] |
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