Old A30

[LollyKat]

Oh, undoubtedly. But since you recommend The Old A30 so often it is a great help to finally identify it!

[ChrisF]

Zelah/Blackwater you need to use the A30 -........ However, it's not very busy there IME.

Ha! You need to ride this section during the rush hour or on a summer Saturday! Then you'll know 'busy'.... alternatives are all hilly and/or difficult to find, so making a JogLe route difficult.

Maybe this thread should be moved to the JogLe/LeJog one, would be useful there for folk who don't know Cornwall.

[Mick F]

Maybe this thread should be moved to the JogLe/LeJog one, would be useful there for folk who don't know Cornwall.

Maybe you're right?
My idea was an Old A30 thread. It goes all the way to London ............. and then to expand it onto other Old Roads.

A49
A6
A9
A82
A1
A5
A59
A90
Maybe there are others?
There MUST be!

Some of these old roads (or at least portions of them) are good cycling roads since the coming of the motorways and the bypasses.

Come on guys, there must be more!

[drossall]

The old A1 is a pretty rideable route from North Hertfordshire into London. From Baldock it's mostly B road through Graveley and Old Stevenage. The line of it then goes through a supermarket car park and right outside a leisure centre, so you need to go round a little on the cycle paths and rejoin the B road through Knebworth.

You can keep following it alongside the dual carriageway into Hatfield, though I tend to prefer the A1000 slightly to the east. After Hatfield, the A1000 is the old A1, and is rideable even in rush hour all the way into London, for a confident cyclist.

Going north from Baldock they've made a bit of a mess of it over the years, in terms of a cyclable route, although there are alternatives. It's better beyond Huntingdon, where the B road runs alongside the newish motorway pretty-much up to Peterborough.

At one time I reckoned I'd raced on most of the A1 between Baldock and Doncaster (and a fair bit further north as well). Not quite true, and you couldn't do it now anyway, but an amazing number of former TT courses on the way up to Blyth.

[pete75]

Only Mick's picture is an A30. The green one is an A35- larger rear window. My first car was the estate/van version.

No the green one is an A30 as well. The A35 had a different grill , painted not chrome but with a broad chrome edging strip.

[PDQ Mobile]

Well I confess to being unsure!
I looked them up on Wiki but each section (A 30/A35) shows a picture of exactly the same car!(which is picture you posted)

The text section however agrees with me; ("the A35 was very similar in appearance to the A30, except for a larger rear window")
Perhaps there were some A30s at the point of change that were produced with the larger window?
However I always believed large window was the defining feature.

Sorry to mess with your thread Mick.

[Mick F]

Sorry to mess with your thread Mick.

Don't worry in the slightest!
It's good to have some humour with thread drift.

My brother-in-law has an A40 Farina when he lived in Bristol. His handbrake released itself one day and the car careered down the steep hill and crashed through a fence and came to rest in a garden!

200px-Austin_A40_(Farina)_Mk_I_reg_ca_1960.JPG (9.32 KiB) Viewed 1251 times

Any road up, I used to drive the Old A40 from the M5 to Oxford back in the early 70s. I used to pick up a mate from Abingdon as I drove down to Portsmouth from Lancashire on a Sunday night. Many many parts of A40 are completely nowadays.

[pete75]

Well I confess to being unsure!
I looked them up on Wiki but each section (A 30/A35) shows a picture of exactly the same car!(which is picture you posted)

The text section however agrees with me; ("the A35 was very similar in appearance to the A30, except for a larger rear window")
Perhaps there were some A30s at the point of change that were produced with the larger window?
However I always believed large window was the defining feature.

Sorry to mess with your thread Mick.

The text sections says "The A35 was very similar in appearance to the A30, except for a larger rear window aperture and a painted front grille, with chrome horse-shoe surround, instead of the chrome grille featured on the A30. " In any case it's not really possible to tell the size of the back window on that green car as much is obscured by pillars and other bodywork. It also has a traffictor slot between the doors . I don't think the A35 had these. The flashers would have been a so called retro fit.

[PDQ]

You are right.
Sorry, I really thought it had a big rear screen.
No secrets from the internet!

679 UXN Vehicle make AUSTIN
Date of first registration 18 June 1953
Year of manufacture 1953
Cylinder capacity (cc) 800cc

[james01]

The old A1 is a pretty rideable route from North Hertfordshire into London. From Baldock it's mostly B road through Graveley and Old Stevenage. The line of it then goes through a supermarket car park and right outside a leisure centre, so you need to go round a little on the cycle paths and rejoin the B road through Knebworth.

You can keep following it alongside the dual carriageway into Hatfield, though I tend to prefer the A1000 slightly to the east. After Hatfield, the A1000 is the old A1, and is rideable even in rush hour all the way into London, for a confident cyclist.

Going north from Baldock they've made a bit of a mess of it over the years, in terms of a cyclable route, although there are alternatives. It's better beyond Huntingdon, where the B road runs alongside the newish motorway pretty-much up to Peterborough.

At one time I reckoned I'd raced on most of the A1 between Baldock and Doncaster (and a fair bit further north as well). Not quite true, and you couldn't do it now anyway, but an amazing number of former TT courses on the way up to Blyth.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pm_Q7X_-2Ck
Fabulous colour footage dated August 1939 of the old A1 heading North from central London.

[PJ520]

Mick, I've never been on the A30, old or otherwise, but I bet you remember it in its jammed 'hayday' and it can be almost spooky standing on a quiet road you remember with the bumper to bumper traffic of yore. I had a such an experience in Shap village that used to be the route to Scotland before the M6 was built. I walked bag and forth across a silent road thinking of times when you'd have to wait forever for a gap in the traffic.

[Mick F]

A6 over Shap is one long-ago memory!
My dad used to fill me with stories and horrors over Shap.

I was riding up there some years ago and chatting in Penrith, and told of The Jungle Cafe on the south side of the fell. When I was there last, it was a caravan sales place. In the old days, the lorries and their drivers would have to hole up there until the weather cleared. Snow, ice, storms, and stuff.

Back in those days, lorries were less powered, the cars were less powered too, and the roads were blocked for weeks. Remember the winter of '62/63? Even down in the "lowlands" of Lancashire where we lived it was 6ft drifts from Jan to March.

As for the A30, we drove up to Yeovil the other day. We went up the Old A30 to Exeter/M5 then off onto the Honiton road A30, as it parted company with the A303 and we went onto the A30. What a lovely road! All through Yarcombe/Crawley/Chard to Crewkern and East Chinnock to Yeovil.

Even Mrs Mick F suggested I should ride that road.
Hills, sweeping bends, long straights, small villages and towns all on a good roads. Perfect!

[PJ520]

We once broke down on Shap in a V8 Pilot. I remember the distributor was on the end of the crankshaft right up against the radiator, somehow we got going again by cleaning the contacts inside that thing. Talk about inaccessible.

[Jon Lucas]

As Mick and others have said, some of the best cycling in the country is on old trunk roads that have been by-passed by motorways or 'improved' roads that run parallel. I've had it in the back of my head to write a short book on these, so any other recommendations would be much appreciated. I may start a separate thread, but in the On the Road section.

[JamesE]

I've had it in the back of my head to write a short book on these, so any other recommendations would be much appreciated. I may start a separate thread, but in the On the Road section.

Please do! I would never have heard of the Old A30 or Old A1 if not for this forum, and it seems like the kind of knowledge that’s hard to stumble on if you don’t already know it exists.