Interstate 55 in Illinois - History

History

Interstate 55 in Illinois is the fourth road to connect St. Louis and Chicago. The first was the Pontiac Trail in 1915. This was largely improved and paved as the new Illinois Route 4 by 1924. In 1926, IL 4 was designated as the route of the new US Route 66, and a new section of US 66 was built to bypass slower sections of IL 4 south of Springfield by 1930. Through the 1950s US 66 was continually widened, straightened, and improved to handle its growing traffic, until its entire length was four lanes wide by 1957.

The roots of Interstate 55 could be traced back to the need of a national highway system. President Dwight D. Eisenhower saw the need of a national network of highways that would help with the mobilization of the army. He had been impressed with the autobahn he saw in Germany during World War II. In 1956 he signed the Federal Aid Highway Act into existence. Although the act provided for a highway replacing Route 66, it was spared destruction for a while because of it being more modern than other routes at the time. Illinois would build its first new Interstate highways on other routes such as Interstate 80, Interstate 57, and Interstate 70, before turning its attention once again to the St. Louis to Chicago route.

However during the 1970s, Route 66 was finally replaced by Interstate 55 as the fourth St. Louis to Chicago highway, serving most of the same communities along the way as the original Pontiac Trail. It was built in sections across Illinois, often on the original Route 66 roadbed. A common construction tactic where Route 66 was already four lanes wide, was to build new southbound lanes for I-55 west of the original road, then rebuild the original southbound lanes of US 66 to be the new northbound lanes for I-55, leaving the original northbound lanes of old US 66 as a two-way service road. One can find many signs posted for Historic Route 66, especially where it deviates from I-55.

The earliest stretch of I-55 was a portion of US 66 which had already been built as a freeway between Gardner and Welco Corners, and which was added to the Interstate system by simply erecting new signs in 1960. Later portions of the highway were built in the 1960s between East St. Louis and Hamel, as bypasses of Springfield and Bloomington-Normal, and as the Stevenson Expressway into Downtown Chicago. The rest of the road was completed in the 1970s.