Great Eastern Highway - Route Description - Greenmount Hill

Greenmount Hill

Great Eastern Highway is notorious for Greenmount Hill, which is a relatively steep 3 km long hill on Perth's eastern outskirts.

At Greenmount Hill, the highway rises from the Swan Coastal Plain to the Darling Scarp at Greenmount. The road is a key heavy vehicle route into and out of Perth, and trucks are required to descend the hill at low speed in low gear. Larger trucks are required to stop at the top of the hill and perform a brake check. Extensive signage has been placed on the down-hill side of the hill to alert truck drivers to their obligations.

A multiple fatal accident in late 1993 at the intersection with Roe Highway occurred where a truck lost control coming down hill and failed to stop. This accident led to the construction of a "truck arrester bed" near the bottom of the hill. It has been used in emergencies several times since.

In the 1960s, a railway level crossing in Bellevue which had been the scene of many accidents was replaced by a bridge which passes over the main Eastern Railway line.

For a part of the Greenmount Hill route, the Old York Road - named because it had been the York Road route in the nineteenth century - runs parallel but at much steeper grades compared to the highway, and rejoins the highway a hundred metres east of Chippers Leap at the top of the main climb of the hill.