Mount Lindesay Highway

Mount Lindesay Highway

The Mount Lindesay Highway is a highway in Queensland which has been given the national route number 13. It runs from Brisbane, where it leaves Ipswich Road in the suburb of Moorooka (as Beaudesert Road to the Logan Motorway), to the Queensland-New South Wales border.

Until 1977, the Mount Lindesay Highway as a named road extended beyond the Queensland-New South Wales border to Tenterfield but the New South Wales section of the road, which still includes some unpaved portions, was decommissioned as a highway by the New South Wales Government due to very low traffic volumes. 8 km south of the Queensland-New South Wales border the decommissioned part of the Mt Lindesay Highway intersects the northern end of the Summerland Way New South Wales state route 91, which runs south to Casino and then on to Grafton.

South of Rathdowney the highway becomes very winding as it climbs the McPherson Range. However it is quite a scenic road, and connects to the northern end of the Lions Road, a scenic drive between Innesplain and the Summerland Way just south of Rosebery, passing Mount Chinghee National Park and Border Ranges National Park on the way.

It is named after Mount Lindesay, the residue of a solidified magma core, that is part of the Mount Warning volcanic area and is situated in the western extreme of Border Ranges National Park.

Until the 1950s it formed part of the main traffic route between Brisbane and Sydney. The coastal route (now the Pacific Highway) was not favoured due to the large number of ferry crossings of the wide coastal rivers, the frequency and severity of flooding of these rivers and the consequent poor state of much of the road for extended periods, and its steep, winding nature as it crossed the intermediate hills between each river valley. In the mid 1950s a sealed road was constructed west from Boonah through Cunninghams Gap to Warwick, and this supplanted the Mount Lindesay Highway as the main Brisbane-Sydney traffic route as far south as Tenterfield. This in turn has since the 1980s been supplanted by the Pacific Highway as the major Brisbane-Sydney route, as a result of extensive upgrading and deviations of the Pacific Highway.

Between 2007 and 2009 4.5 km of the highway in Logan local government area was upgraded. As well as providing dual carraigeways the work included building service roads so that local traffic does not have to travel on the main carriageways, thereby reducing congestion.