with the new road / roundabout put in you'd a though they could have removed the old road.

http://g.co/maps/y3yvj

I don't think that's the old road - more likely it's a checkpoint/wide load area - you see them at a few roundabouts (e.g. M5/M50, M4/M49).

There's a more notable example a few miles to the north - a special bridge to keep the old road open!

And it's at the other junction of the same two roads!

M60-Tony (who no longer posts on these forums) used to say that these routes through roundabouts had been specially provided to accommodate outsize loads of power generation equipment being moved between the Westinghouse factories at Trafford Park and Stafford.

There used to be another one at the A56/A556 junction at M56 J7. Presumably the route was A56-A556-A50-A5011-A34.

I wondered if it might be something like that. I've occasionally seen pictures of huge transformers being moved in that area. But could they get round the roundabouts on the A34 Newcastle-u-L inner ring road?

Edit: there's a way through one of those here.

We had a school trip to Dowmac's plant by the ECML and A16 at Tallington back in the late 80s and they told us that to move some of the longer concrete items like bridges there are a few routes they use that have roundabouts with the middle built on a tray that just gets craned out of the way for them, never knew if it was true or not.

If you look up from the A500, the extra bridge looks stronger (solid concrete rather than pillars) than the two carrying the roundabout

As discussed most of these are on the abnormal load route from Alstom Stafford.
Links to abnormal load Map and route grid here

I assume this one is due to the limited turning circle of the vehicles?

One for high and wide loads at M55 J1 at Broughton, Preston HERE

The trees have now been cut down lol

There's a straight-through route on a roundabout near the Westpoint Centre in Exeter. I'll dig a link up later on.

One I can explain, this one just outside Faslane must be for moving military equipment around.

This one, in Silverknowes, north west Edinburgh, doesn't lend itself to explanation so easily.

There's another one on the A500 at M6 J16 which is even clearly marked "abnormal loads only".

Unlike most of the other examples on this thread, this one really is a bypassed old road.

It marks the old line of the roundabout before they extended the A500 to the West and therefore had to increase the size of the roundabout to accommodate it.

Certainly the roads across the roundabouts on the A34 were specifically designed as such for the traffic. The extra bridge at Talke is the same age as the two bridges on the roundabout. As for Hanford, the through road has survived a major redevelopment of the roundabout in the past 5 years!

Those signs must be fairly recent additions - I remember going on a coach tour to France in 2000, and the coach stopped in that bit inside the J16 roundabout to change drivers. The relief driver's car was parked there waiting for the coach to arrive, he then took over the coach and the outgoing driver went off in the car. I'm fairly certain those signs weren't there then.

Were the signs put in to stop coach firms using it for that kind of thing, or do they still do it?

That one is very easy to get wrong since it follows the natural curvature of the roundabout.

There's also one at http://maps.google.co.uk/maps?q=Silverk ... 15000&z=20 which if you follow them back leads me to think it was a feranti route to get stuff to and from their testing lab which in the 1970's was based in the Silverknowes area - possibly off marine drive where caravan club is now?

Feranti also had depots at crewe toll and sighthill. Using this route would avoid the low railway (now footpath) bridge near crewe toll