Scene on the Road

I'm driving "south" in Maryland, on US 40 - the east-west route between New Jersey and Utah. I probably confused some readers in my previous post. The classic transcontinental highway just runs parallel to north-south I-95 for a while before it heads west near Baltimore. US 40 itself doesn't go north-south.

But US 40 is one of those old cross country road trip routes - not unlike the much more famous Route 66, where Martin Milner and George Maharis' characters drove a shiny new Corvette convertible in the 1960's television show.

During its heyday, US 40 went from Atlantic City to San Francisco, and was one of the highways created in the 1920's when the U.S. government took over the numbering of federal roads. So in many sections of the country, US 40 replaced classic road names like "Lincoln Highway," "Victory Road" and "National Road." These couple dozen miles of US 40 in Maryland are NOT on the old Lincoln Highway, which is a road well documented by fellow Inquirer photographer Eric Mencher and his wife Kass Mencher. They have been shooting the Pennsylvania portion - US 30 - for years now and last year together retraced the entire route to the West Coast.

Not wanting to step on their toes, I am avoiding a Lincoln Highway road trip this summer, but this still gives me chance to drive on a piece of that particular American road history.

The National Interstate and Defense Highways Act of 1956 diverted or killed off many of the rest of the cross country US highways.

As the stretch of I-95 in Delaware is the most-expensive toll road on the East Coast (and with an upcoming increase, is set to become one of the costliest in the nation) many drivers use US 40 to bypass the booths, where if they look hard, they can see remnants of the Golden Age of Automobiling.