Western Freeway (Victoria)
See also: Western Highway, Victoria and Ballarat Road, Melbourne
The Western Freeway is a 125 kilometre Australian freeway linking the state capital of Victoria (Melbourne) to the major regional city of Ballarat. Signed as M8, it used to branch off from the Western Highway (having come originally beyond the Victorian/South Australian border outside Adelaide) at Burrumbeet, 22 kilometres north-west of Ballarat, and now ends officially to Melbourne's freeway network via the Western Ring Road, in the middle western suburbs of Melbourne. Both the freeway and Western Highway beyond Ballarat are part of the National Highway network for the Melbourne-Adelaide route.
Plans are underway for the freeway to be extended west to Ararat, and eventually, to Stawell.
The Western Freeway subsumes and bypasses most sections of the older Western Highway. Former bypassed sections of the Western Highway are generally designated sequentially from C801 to C805, or Metropolitan Route 8 (although oddly enough, this used to still keep the old National Route 8 shield) (within suburban Melbourne).
The Melbourne section of the Western Highway is shown in the 1969 Melbourne Transportation Plan as part of the F12 Freeway corridor.
Read more about Western Freeway (Victoria): Deer Park Bypass, Anthony's Cutting Realignment, Future Upgrades, Towns, Exits and Intersections
Famous quotes containing the words western and/or freeway:
“When lilacs last in the dooryard bloomed
And the great star early drooped in the western sky in the night,
I mourned, and yet shall mourn with ever-returning spring.
Ever-returning spring, trinity sure to me you bring,
Lilac blooming perennial and drooping star in the west,
And thought of him I love.”
—Walt Whitman (1819–1892)
“The landscape of the northern Sprawl woke confused memories of childhood for Case, dead grass tufting the cracks in a canted slab of freeway concrete. The train began to decelerate ten kilometers from the airport. Case watched the sun rise on the landscape of childhood, on broken slag and the rusting shells of refineries.”
—William Gibson (b. 1948)