History
The New England Highway has its origins in the track which developed north from Newcastle to reach the prime wool growing areas of the New England region which Europeans settled following expeditions by New South Wales (NSW) Surveyor-General John Oxley in 1818 and botanist Allan Cunningham in 1827 and 1829. It became known as the Great Northern Road.
Improvement was limited during the 19th century, initially due to the lack of traffic and funding, then the transfer of traffic from road to the parallel railway which opened in stages between 1857 and 1888 between Newcastle and Wallangarra.
When the NSW main road system was reorganised in August 1928, the Great Northern Road was gazetted as part of state highway 9, the Great Northern Highway. State highway 9 stretched from Milsons Point on the north shore of Sydney Harbour (at that time the Sydney Harbour Bridge was still under construction) via the under-construction road from Hornsby to Gosford (completed 1930), then via Newcastle to Hexham then to Tenterfield. From Tenterfield it continued to the Queensland border near Mount Lindesay. The only major change to this route since its designation has been a re-routing between Tenterfield and the NSW/Queensland border (see below).
In 1931, state highway 10, the North Coast Highway, which commenced at Hexham and extended to Tweed Heads, was renamed the Pacific Highway and extended south to Milsons Point, so that state highway 9 began at Hexham, as it does today. In 1933 the Great Northern Highway was renamed the New England Highway.
In 1954 main road 374, running from Tenterfield to Wallangarra, was redesignated as part of state highway 9 and named as part of the New England Highway, and the section of the New England Highway from Tenterfield to Mount Lindesay was renumbered as state highway 24 and renamed the Mount Lindesay Highway. The rerouting of the New England Highway to run from Tenterfield to Wallangarra rather than to Mount Lindesay was due to the construction of a sealed road from Boonah through Cunninghams Gap to Warwick in the early 1950s. The sealed road encouraged much more traffic to travel from Brisbane to Tenterfield via Warwick than via Mount Lindesay and the unsealed route on to Tenterfield.
At the time of the rerouting of the New England Highway to Wallangarra and the naming of the Mount Lindesay Highway, arrangements were made by the NSW Department of Main Roads with the Queensland Main Roads Department to name the onward routes from Wallangarra and Mount Lindesay to Brisbane as the New England and Mount Lindesay Highways respectively. At this time they were allocated the national route numbers of 15 for the New England Highway Hexham-Brisbane and 13 for the Mount Lindesay Highway Brisbane-Tenterfield.
Read more about this topic: New England Highway
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