On This Day: Trans-Canada Highway opens as world’s longest national road

JULY 30, 1962: The 5,000-mile-long Trans-Canada Highway opened as the world’s longest national road on this day in 1962.

The final stretch was completed at the treacherous Rogers Pass, 4,363ft high in British Columbia’s Rocky Mountains, 12 years after construction began.

The highway, which cost one billion Canadian dollars (£327million), ran through all ten of the country’s provinces and connected the Pacific Ocean with the Atlantic.

It began in Victoria, British Columbia (BC) and ended at St John’s, Newfoundland after passing 12 major cities, including Edmonton, Winnipeg, Ottawa and Montreal.

Among the first users was lorry driver A D Booth, who took eight hours to transport 264 crates of strawberries 320 miles from Salmon Arm, BC to Calgary.

Before then, fruit from the more temperate Pacific coast took up to three days to reach the country’s extreme-weather interior by train.

That summer, more than a million tourists also flocked to the Trans-Canada Highway to take scenic drives through the majestic Rockies.

But its first major test would come in winter, especially on the Rogers Pass, which suffers the highest snowfall in North America.

Dozens of people were killed in avalanches that struck the former train route, before a five-mile rail tunnel was bored through the Selkirk Range in 1916 to avoid it.

A British Pathé newsreel shows the extraordinary lengths the Canadian army took – including blasting the snow away with Howitzer guns - to avoid similar disasters.

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This blasting caused a huge controlled avalanche before machines cleared the massive mounds of white stuff off the road.

Also filmed was one of the many snowsheds, tunnel-like structures that allow fast-moving walls of ice to pass over the highway.

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Today the road, unlike many Alpine mountain passes, continues to remain open all year round thanks to the world’s largest mobile avalanche control programme.

A second Trans-Canada branch, the 1,840-mile-long Yellowhead Highway, which begins 600 miles further north in Masset, BC and ends in Winnipeg was built in 1970.

The following year, the federal highway system, which is signified by its white-on-green maple leaf markers, was divided into two corridors twice more in the province of Ontario and even into three further east in Quebec.

It is a four-lane motorway across most of its route, but is squeezed into a single-carriageway through most of the mountain sections.

Yet despite its huge scale, the Trans Canada is now only the third longest national road and the fourth overall.

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The 30,000-mile Pan American Highway, which was completed in 1950, is the longest road, although it travels through several different countries.

It joins up roads between Alaska and Argentina, although it is not possible to drive between Central and South America due to the Darien Gap in Panama.

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The longest national roads are the 8,700-mile Highway 1 circuit of Australia followed by the 6,800-mile Trans Siberian in Russia and then the Trans-Canada.

The 3,540-mile RN 010 in China and 3,360-mile coast-to-coast U.S. Route 20 are also among the longest.

Yet the Trans-Canada Highway remains one of the world’s most romantic ribbons of tarmac as it carves through the Rockies and vast swathes of pristine wilderness.