As I hinted at a few days ago, there's a new layer on SABRE Maps which isn't actually anything to do with British and Irish roads per se, but might be of interest if you ever go abroad - 1:250,000 coverage of France c. 1959. The maps were created by the US Army Map Service, and hence being the work of the US Government, are in the public domain.

Why am I interested in this? Well, France was the first country to get road numbering - it's been around for 200 years and our own numbering system was inspired by theirs. More importantly, as you're probably aware, the French have gone in for mass road building and detrunking / renumbering on a scale that positively dwarfs ours, first around 1973, then especially around 2006, which nearly wiped the RN5 off the map entirely, for example. So, I've been interested in getting hold of a map showing the state of the road network immediately before all this kicked off for some time.

Click here for the coverage.

At the moment, the tiles don't seem to be notably impacting disk space, but I'm concerned that since it's "off topic", it doesn't really belong on SABRE. You'll also notice that most of the search and click features don't work apart from in a few fringe cases like Calais which happen to just fall inside the UK National Grid system. To us, the A75 is a 40mph slog behind lorries, not a marvel of road engineering.

Perhaps SARA could host it long term?

What do you think?

I think it's brilliant and well worth SABRE having, actually.

The mapping is quite dense and hard to read, and their use of US Route shields for Routes Nationales is quite odd!

As someone who interprets our name as standing for

the Society for All (British+and+Irish) (Road+Enthusiasts)
rather than
the Society for All (British+and+Irish+Road) Enthusiasts

I think your addition is a great resource, Ritchie.

There would probably be no harm, though, in offering it to SARA as well. More co-operation / cross-fertilization of ideas between the various national road-enthusiast sites would be A Very Good Thing, in my view.

I have notified the good people of SARA in my best French here.

There's a lot more US AMS coverage up on SABRE Maps this morning, extended to most of what they have of Western Europe. I'm not sure of the merits of uploading huge amounts of not a lot in Norway, but there you go. Here's the old Ijsllmeer in the Netherlands before large bits of it were reclaimed.

Annoyingly, they don't have very much of Germany, including any map with the former West / East border. I'm not sure if this is because it wasn't scanned or that such a map wasn't produced for political reasons.

The University of Texas Perry-Castañeda Library do take donations to scan maps that aren't online yet, so this might be something to look into if there's enough interest to get hold of the missing areas.