This week's Throwback Thursday takes us back to September 2008, with a couple of button copy signs on US 22 eastbound on the Veteran's Memorial Bridge over the Ohio River in Weirton, West Virginia. US 22 has a quick jaunt through the northern West Virginia panhandle on the freeway portion of the US route between Steubenville, Ohio and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
The Asheville Citizen-Times continues to do a great job covering all the angles of the Interstate 40 Haywood County rock slide. An article in Sunday's edition provides a strong historical perspective on how the Pigeon River routing of Interstate 40 came about. And perhaps most strikingly, in an article that ran just prior to the highway's opening in the fall of 1968, how engineers from both Tennessee and North Carolina warned "...that slides would probably be a major problem along the route for many years." On February 12, 1969, not long after the Interstate opened, the first rock slide that would close I-40 occurred. Like many other Interstates within North Carolina, Interstate 40 through the mountains has a history prior to formation of the Interstate Highway System and was also a heated political battle between local communities. The discussion for a road that would eventually become Interstate 40 dates back to the 1940's as the idea for interregional high
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