The Lost Junction Shap North
During the early days of the M6 the building work continued piecemeal from the original Preston Bypass, through a series of Bypasses and Link Sections, by 1966 work had progressed to the point where a continues section of Motorway had been opened from Carnforth in the North to Walsall in the South, with plans already in place to extend the motorway both south east to the M1 at Rugby and north to join the A74 north of Carlisle, engineers now faced two major problems, south of Walsall the M6 needed to plough through the outskirts of Birmingham, whilst north of Carnforth the highest section of the M6 needed to be built over Shap fells. Before either of these sections where tackled the decision was made to build an isolated bypass round Penrith with its narrows in the town centre providing a bottleneck for A6 traffic.
The posed one problem the next scheduled junction was just a few yards north of Shap summit, however as the planned route crossed the A6 3 times it was decided to stop the motorway short of this and put the southern end of the new bypass at the first A6 bridge north of Shap. Building work started in earnest the bypass being opened to traffic on 7th November 1968. With the junction being similar to the diagram below:-
Work went on apace to connect this section to the Lancaster bypass at Carnforth this opened in just under 2 years later on 11th October 1970. However what was done about this junction? The answer was close it and dig up the slip roads. Possible the first time a motorway junction had been closed. Now the northbound slip road has degenerated into a farm track as can be seen right, whilst the southbound slip road has gone completely. The former junction layout is now as shown left.
