This week's Throwback Thursday takes us to La belle province, or Quebec to the lay person. Heading east from Montreal through the Eastern Townships to Sherbrooke is Autoroute 10. At one time, Quebec had blue road signs instead of green road signs along their autoroutes. By the time I visited this part of Quebec in May 2008, the blue signs had been phased out, but there were a few signs that could still be found scattered around the province. So it was a real treat to find this blue Autoroute 10 sign with another blast from the past, an Autoroute des Cantons l'Est shield on QC 112 eastbound near Magog, Quebec.
In the nearly 60 years Interstate 40 has been open to traffic through the Pigeon River Gorge in the mountains of Western North Carolina, it has been troubled by frequent rockslides and damaging flooding, which has seen the over 30-mile stretch through North Carolina and Tennessee closed for months at a time. Most recently, excessive rainfall from Hurricane Helene in September 2024 saw sections of Interstate 40 wash away into a raging Pigeon River. While the physical troubles of Interstate 40 are well known, how I-40 came to be through the area is a tale of its own. Interstate 40 West through Haywood County near mile marker 10. I-40's route through the Pigeon River Gorge dates to local political squabbles in the 1940s and a state highway law written in 1921. A small note appeared in the July 28, 1945, Asheville Times. It read that the North Carolina State Highway Commission had authorized a feasibility study of a "...water-level road down [the] Pigeon River to the Tennessee l...
Comments