Can someone please clarify this. I have just been messing around on open street map and it shows the B7076 extending South of Gretna to the new northern ring road at Carlisle. Basically ASDA At Carlisle! I always thought this b road terminated north of the border?? If the road has now been extended it will be now the only 7 road in England, apart of course from the A7!
Can anyone clarify this information. Many thanks! M56phil

It could just be someone on OSM having a flight of fancy. Last time I went along there it was unclassified.

It is not on the OS maps. So if it is real (which I doubt) it would be of very recent vintage.

Would make sense though to maintain a classified alternative to the new M6. But personally I doubt it if it was going to be done it would have been done when the motorway opened.

That sounds like wishful thinking - I'd like some hard evidence, given anyone can go in and edit OpenStreetMap. The road will be the responsibility of Cumbria County Council regardless of its number, so they ought to know. The only reason I can think of doing this is the road attracts sufficient local traffic to warrant Class 2 funding.

Even so, it's still in zone - the current way of thinking is the River Eden is the 5/7 zone boundary up to where the A7 crosses it. Of course, being the old A74, the route's been in zone since day one.

Actually, it crossed the border (just) before. The A74 had always passed into England, before the M6 was extended, and the A74(M) does still.

http://www.sabre-roads.org.uk/maps/inde ... =8&layer=0

The local access road alongside the M6 completion was designed to provide access to villages and properties as a substitute for the former intermediate GSJs on the former A74 (see Wiki page on Cumberland Gap). To discourage end-to-end traffic,

(1) it was designed with two doglegs in it;

(2) it was made only 6m wide where it is new build (6.75m from Todhills southwards because it's used by traffic to Hespin Wood landfill site);

(3) Gretna was not signed from its south end nor Carlisle from its north end.

In view of this, my guess is that it hasn't been promoted to a B road, but if by any chance it has, it could be as a result of the recent completion of the CNDR. The signs at the junction with the CNDR should answer the question definitively.

I see that OSM also shows the double bridge over the Sark, which hasn't existed for over 10 years.

From the Wiki page on the B7076:

"The bridge at Gretna over the River Sark, which forms the border, was one of those built by Telford and only wide enough for one lane of modern traffic. Circa 1960, when still part of the A74, it was supplemented by a temporary steel Bailey bridge alongside for northbound traffic, with the old bridge used for southbound traffic. This setup remained when the road was demoted on completion of the A74 Gretna bypass in 1973 and its upgrade to motorway in 1992. Finally the Telford bridge was sensitively widened in 2001, winning a Saltire award, and the Bailey bridge removed."

Sounds like a "kick up" . It happens from time to time .I wish now I'd taken a photo of a sign outside Leics a lot of years ago ,when there was work done on the A6. Can't remember the quoted start ( it was wrong anyway) ,as was the end ,which was Inverness.

That might have been describing something like the "London - Carlisle - Glasgow - Inverness Trunk Road", which certainly did exist as a single entity. In fact, there was a rejected proposal in 1934 to extend the A6 over the A74 and A82 (ie: the rest of the trunk route) to terminate in Inverness.

Pity they didn't do it. It might have avoided a lot of later arguments about the numbering of the motorway.




Here you may be making a mistake many others have made. A trunk road name does not usually correspond to a single road number. Signs at major road works are one of the few places where trunk road names are likely to be visible, but they are worded misleadingly. The most famous is "London-Thurso trunk road A1".

IIRC I once read that, had Southern Ireland not become a separate country before the road classification system was introduced, then the A6 number might have been given to the London-Carlisle-Glasgow-Inverness route in its entirety, with the A1 following the A9 route to Inverness (can't recall whether the plan was for it to go all the way to Thurso though). However, equally I remember reading another suggestion that the 9-zone may have reserved for Ireland, with the 8-zone covering the whole of Scotland north of the A8, in which case the A6 and A1 would have had to terminate at Carlisle and Edinburgh.

If Ireland hadn't split (just a hypothetical scenario, rather than a political point) then personally I'd have made the actual 8-zone the 7-zone, with the actual 9-zone becoming the 8-zone, and the A6 continuing to Glasgow with the 5-zone to the west and the 6-zone to the east.

The 9-zone being reserved for (a united) Ireland is a good suggestion. Once Eiré declared indepedence, the remainder of the island ended up with a totally random system.

Perhaps they should still have done this - there's not really 30 roads in Scotland that deserve F99 status.

I would suspect a united Ireland would be using the Dublin radial system that already has reserved numbers for NI (i.e. the gap in the N3) rather than taking all the 9x numbers from GB, somehow...