March 22, 2005

Horse 319 - Spaghetti Junction 1

I read the Prawn's blog this morning and looked at the links for Sydney's new orbital, the massive contruction works and then looked at the details for the cross city tunnel.
Allow me to tell my own story with the aid of this picture:




This is Junction 6 of the M6 near Birmingham, officially known as either Junction 6 or even the Gravelly Hill Motorway Interchange in the planning documents but everyone calls this beastie Spaghetti Junction. I suspect that the Sydney M7 Junction with the M4 will be very big put still puny in comparison with this one.

It connects Britain's second most trafficked road (after the M1) with the A38 (Aston Expressway) and the B4139. Also in the mix are several on and off ramps from minor roads, a canal and a railway line. At nearly 2 miles long it's roughly 7 times as long as the Sydney Harbour Bridge. The area of this one junction is bigger than the on-ramps on the Sydney Harbour Bridge by nearly a factor of 12. That "little" road that continues from the bottom to the middle left of the picture is in fact the M6 itself with 6 lanes in each direction. In other words, this aint some pathetic tin-pot fly-over.

It does have one drawback, being the biggest road junction in the world it also possesses one of the biggest traffic snarls as well. I accidentally had the misfortune of driving into it on a Friday afternoon at 5:30pm. Suffice to say that the jam was so bad that obviously the regulars knew about this and some got out of their cars; one lady in particular (and it's perhaps an indictment upon me that I should notice this) clad in slightly less than we would consider normal for 20 degrees Celsius (though in the UK it's a barmy summer's day) was fawned out upon the bonnet of her Ford Orion, trying to get some rays from the afternoon sun. J6 is by all accounts a very good place to learn about one aspect of heaven... eternity becomes more than just a sign on a bridge. You can wait for hours here.

The other thing is that such a large thing expands and contracts in the heat, it makes it very interesting to hear a motorway junction creak. Also being a high wind area, cars get blown about as if they were nine-pins.

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