Hume Highway – Yass Bridge, built 1876.
After half a century of continuous construction and the investment of billions of dollars, a fully duplicated Hume Highway is at last a reality.
The final stage in the upgrade of the Hume occurred at Holbrook in southern NSW with the completion of the town's bypass. The bypass will open to traffic in July.
Rebuilding the 808 kilometre Hume Highway has been a massive engineering endeavour, one made more challenging by the vast and varied landscape through which it travels.
As well as duplicating the entire road, the project also involved removing some 90 million cubic metres of earth, erecting 205 new bridges, building 68 new interchanges and planting millions of trees. Along with Holbrook, the Highway has been re-routed around 49 towns.
It is estimated that as many as 130,000 Australians at some point worked on site transforming the highway. One of the workers now putting the finishing touches on the Holbrook Bypass first started working on the Hume back in 1972.
The upgrade has reduced travel times between Sydney and Melbourne by around three hours.
A new interactive website has been created to mark the completion of the upgrade: www.rms.nsw.gov.au/humecelebration.
The Highway closely follows the path first taken by European explorers Hamilton Hume and William Hovell during their successful 1824 expedition to find an alternate inland route from Sydney to Port Phillip, the site of modern day Melbourne. Work on its northern section between Picton and the Goulburn Plains begun in 1819 on the orders of Governor Lachlan Macquarie.
