A419 road

The A419 road is a primary route between Chiseldon near Swindon at junction 15 of the M4 with the A346 road, and Whitminster in Gloucestershire, England.

From the M4 to Cirencester it is a dual carriageway road, which generally follows the course of the Roman road Ermin Street, but dualling work completed in the late 1990s, and the bypass of Cirencester, has taken it off-course in some places. The road goes through Cirencester and Stroud then finishes at a roundabout with the A38 close to junction 13 with the M5, close to a Little Chef (useful for M5 drivers as well).

The 3-mile (4.8 km) £4m Stratton St. Margaret (Swindon) Bypass opened in October 1977. The 2-mile (3.2 km) £2.4m Blunsdon-Cricklade Improvement opened in June 1988. The 4-mile (6.4 km) Latton Bypass opened on December 24, 1997. At the start of the Cirencester bypass, the dual carriageway continues as the A417, and the A419 goes from here into the centre of Cirencester.

The A419 is unusual in that it is managed and maintained by a private company, Road Management Group, on behalf of the UK Department for Transport.

Parts of the newly dualled sections road are surfaced in concrete, which is relatively unusual in the UK. The high tyre noise generated by this surface is unpopular with nearby residents.

The major bottleneck in Swindon at Blunsdon traffic lights and the nearby Turnpike roundabout, where local traffic mixes with through traffic for the M4 and the Cotswolds has recently been addressed. Construction of a bypass at Blunsdon commenced on 13 September 2006, and was fully completed in February 2009, although the new dual two-lane carriageway (with an additional crawler lane going southbound up Blunsdon hill) was fully open by January 2009. ^[1] A flyover at Commonhead, the main junction for southeast Swindon and another notorious source of congestion, was opened to traffic on 6 February 2007.

History

When it was first designated in 1922, the A419 ran from Hungerford, Berkshire, to Gloucester^[2]. Before the war, the section from Cirencester to Gloucester was renumbered the A417, and the A419 was extended from Cirencester to Stroud and then on part of the route of the former A434 through Stonehouse to a junction with the A38 at Hardwicke, just south of Gloucester.

Following the opening of the M4 motorway, the section from Hungerford to Commonhead was downclassified to the B4192. The old lay-bys remain, showing that this was once a major route south. The road was extended south from Commonhead for 0.8 miles (1.3 km) to the M4 on the route of the old A345.

When the M5 motorway was opened, the road was rerouted west of Stroud. A new alignment, known as the Ebley by-pass, was built south of the old route from Cainscross to a point just south of Stonehouse, and from there the road was rerouted on the former line of the A4096 to Eastington, and then to the M5 and the A38 at Whitminster. The old route became the B4008.

References

External links

Highways Agency pages:

• A419/A417 Route Management Strategy
• Blunsdon Bypass Scheme
• Commonhead Junction Scheme
• SABRE page on the A417