Some of the most complex types of concrete repairs often involve taking place at busy motorway junctions, in no small part because it can be very difficult, if not impractical to close the road entirely, meaning that repair programmes need to be undertaken in stages.
A lot of preparation goes into repair, refurbishment and upgrade works, and one of the first examples of a motorway repair was undertaken on the first motorway in the United Kingdom, just weeks after it had opened.
The first motorway to be constructed in the UK was the Preston Bypass, which was meant to be the first part of a North-South motorway road that would later become the M6.
By 1937, with road usage increasing dramatically, plans and proposals began for a road that could work as an alternative to the A6, which passed through the centre of Preston itself and could become regularly congested at rush hour and during events such as the Blackpool Illuminations.
It would take 12 years for the Special Roads Act 1949 to be enacted to make constructing roads that could only be used by certain classes of vehicle legal, and the Preston Bypass from Broughton on the north side to Bamber Bridge on the south side was seen as an experimental test case.
If it worked, Preston would be free of its congestion woes and it would show the template that could be used nationally, but if it didn’t work then the money lost would be minimal and the lessons could be learned in time for the next attempt.
Construction began in earnest in 1956, however, due to the weather being particularly Prestonian, another five months were added to the construction period and more hard-filling material needed to be sourced due to the rainfall washing away the material planned for the embankment and foundations.
Several lessons were learned during this construction, such as the need for hard shoulders and effective water drainage to avoid the risk of aquaplaning, and on 5th December 1958, then-Prime Minister Harold Macmillan opened the road and became the first man to travel on a motorway in his Austin Sheerline limousine.
It would take just 46 days for the first major problems to emerge.
During the construction of the motorway, the drainage system was found to be substandard, which caused water to drain into the gravel hard shoulder and soak into the base layer.
The freeze-thaw cycle then took effect, which caused large parts of the road surface to break and crumble as a result, something that would later be fixed with better drainage and the use of concrete motorway structures that could better handle the water.
This road was repaired, with additional drainage systems added across the entire length of the carriageway to ensure that it did not happen again.
Ultimately, the Preston Bypass experiment was a success, with a third lane added, before a four-lane bypass was built in its place during the early 1990s.
These early lessons would help with the construction of a nationwide motorway network, starting with the M1 from London to Leeds in 1959.