A74

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A74

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From:

Gretna

To:

Glasgow

Length:

93 miles (149.7 km)

Meets:

M6, A7, A75, A701,
A702, A71, A72, A721, A8

Now part of:

B7071, A72, B7078, A702, B7076, A701, M6

Highways Authorities

Glasgow

Counties

Dumfriesshire, Lanarkshire, Cumberland

Route outline (key)

A74	Glasgow - Broomhouse
A74	Broomhouse-Abington
A74(M)	Abington - Gretna
A74	Gretna - Carlisle

Related Pages

Canderwater Interchange

Fullarton Road Interchange

The A74 in 1980.

The A74, despite only a fragment of it remaining in Glasgow today, is a road that is much remembered by those who used to make the great journey north (or south) along it before it was replaced by the A74(M) throughout the 1990s.

The old road

The majority of the A74's dualling took place in the early to late 1960s, and as a result it was quite a low standard road by modern expectations. Aspects of the design which made the road notorious included narrow laybys for bus stops, at-grade right turns, sharp bends, and narrow lanes for most of the link between the M6 at Carlisle and the M74 at Blackwood.

The road itself had some excellent sections in terms of engineering, despite the low standard, including a portion with split level carriageways much like those on the M6 further south through the Lune gorge, and several landmarks helped travellers locate themselves on the otherwise bleak and windswept moors of the southern uplands. For many, the old switchback under the West Coast Main Line on the Lanarkshire boundary was always a memorable landmark of the old road. The bend still remains on the now single carriageway old road, the B7076, but the original railway bridge itself was replaced in the mid-2000s, taking away the character of the old double bend somewhat.

In December 1988, the A709 junction became internationally recognised as the site of a crater following the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103. For many weeks after the disaster, this section of the A74 along with the burned out houses on Sherwood Crescent alongside the dual carriageway were photographed and shown around the world by several media outlets, the tragedy making the small town of Lockerbie famous for all the wrong reasons.

Progress north was always quick, which gave the road its fearsome reputation as a dangerous anachronism, so the A74 reached Blackwood sooner than would be expected, but not before a particularly narrow bypass of Lesmahagow (which was one of the first sections to be bypassed by the M74 in the early 1980s), and traffic could then be directed onto the motorway to reach Glasgow's boundaries before being tipped back onto the A74 at the M73 junction. This situation changed in the early 1990s when the connection to Cambuslang opened, bypassing some more of the route, although unlike all the other bypassed sections the A74 here was not renumbered.

Following the A74 from the current terminus of the M74 takes drivers through the east end of Glasgow, past Celtic's ground, and eventually into the Gorbals, before the route gets swallowed up in the byzantine maze that is the one-way system on the south bank of the River Clyde.

The improvements begin

Throughout the 1990s, the A74 was almost a constant building site, as crews moved up and down the route from the extended M74 at Abington to Gretna. This meant that long sections of the rural road were subject to a maze of contraflows, diversions, and realignments as the motorway slowly but surely took over the old 1960s dual carriageway.

The Gretna Bypass opened first, in 1992, and as the decade went on, various sections opened in a seemingly random fashion. The final section, which now forms junctions 15 to 16 of the A74(M) opened in 1999, four years after the rest of the route had been upgraded. The new motorway gave the route three lanes in each direction, and even ten years after its completion it still feels much quieter than the M6 to the south, or the narrow dual two lane section of the M74 further north (itself now a bottleneck).

The construction of the motorway posed some interesting engineering challenges. In some places a brand new road was built alongside for non-motorway traffic, and in others the old dualled road was simply reduced to a single carriageway with the motorway rushing alongside it. One notable thing from the new motorway is that most of the signs are patched to read A74(M). Underneath they all read M6, for the original intention was to extend the M6 from Carlisle all the way up the new motorway, to Abington, where it would arbitarily change to M74. For reasons that have never been discovered, this change never happened in 1999 when the motorway was fully linked up from Gretna to Glasgow. Several signs still hint at the road being the M6 - although it appears for now that any renumbering has been ruled out.

The Cumberland Gap

The other remaining section of the A74, and the one that drew far more attention from travellers, was the Cumberland Gap. This section of the A74 was the link between the M6 at Carlisle and A74(M) at Gretna. Built originally with the Carlisle Bypass, it was (somewhat ironically considering the bottleneck it became) once the highest quality section of the entire A74, as some of it featured hard shoulders and crude grade seperation in the form of LILO junctions.

Arguments have raged between the Scottish Executive and the Highways Agency over who would build the motorway upgrade to finally connect the English and Scottish motorway networks together. By the turn of the 21st Century it was running the risk of becoming a major embarrassment to all parties concerned, and in 2006 contracts were signed and works finally began to eliminate the gap once and for all. As with some of the 1990s sections of the A74(M), this stretch was to be upgraded entirely online with a new road for non-motorway traffic constructed alongside. Existing overbridges would be retained and the majority of the works would be within highway boundaries.

The other notable feature of this new motorway was the retention of Todhills service area, which was given brand new slip roads and designated as a rest area. This enabled the small site, which consisted purely of a roadside café and petrol station on each side of the A74 to avoid the stringent requirements of a full service area, and protected the jobs of the staff at the site. Whether or not the concept will be extended to other stretches of motorway is still unknown.

One thing that was rather unlike the 1990s upgrades was that this section was to become part of the M6 to the border with Scotland, where the existing A74(M) would remain. The non-motorway access road alongside has also not been numbered, and is built to a low specification unlike the former dualled sections of the A74 further north.

The contracts required the demolition of the original Mossband Viaduct, resulting in a wider road crossing over the West Coast Main Line carrying both motorway and local road, as well as a new bridge to carry the widened carriageways over the River Esk. The motorway replacement opened to traffic in the early hours of December 5, 2008, which was also the 50th anniversary of the completion of the Preston Bypass (the first stretch of motorway in the UK). This marked the end of one of the most notorious sections of A road in the United Kingdom, and the end of an era for the A74.

The future

In Glasgow, it is still possible that the A74 number may become defunct upon completion of the M74 extension. If this occurs, it will leave the A74(M) as a motorway standard bypass of a road which no longer exists, and may prompt renumbering to either M74 or M6. The question of renumbering all the junctions on the motorway will also be raised as there will be three junctions before J1 is reached. Even if the number is eventually lost to the history books, it will be difficult to erase the nostalgic connotations raised by this old artery.