M5 works nearing end of road
THE end is finally in sight for long-running Midland motorway works after two years of M5 misery.
News that the £100 million Oldbury Viaduct repairs are nearing completion will be music to the ears of many fed-up motorists who have found themselves in gridlock along one of Europe’s busiest stretches of motorways.
The southbound carriageway was fully opened at 4am on Friday, December 20, but drivers must stick to a 50mph speed limit, which will remain in place until technology testing is completed early next year.
The link to the M5 south from M6 J8 south has also been restored to two lanes.
On the northbound carriageway, surfacing is now complete and all temporary steel barriers have been replaced with cones. A full reopening is planned this week.
A spokesman for Highways England said: “We’re keeping a temporary 50mph speed limit in place on both sides of the road while we test technology on new gantries that we’ve put in place on the main carriageway.
“The speed cameras will remain in operation to enforce the limit.
“Given the scale of the work we’ve been doing, we also need to restore lane capacity at M5 J3 northbound and we’ll be doing this in the coming weeks. We’re planning to complete this work by midJanuary.
“We’ll need overnight closures of the M5 in the new year to do this.
“We’ll also be restoring M5 J4a northbound to its original layout.
“These works will be phased to avoid too many closures on the network at one time.
“In addition, we need to remove the scaffolding under the M5 and this will continue until April 2020. We’ll need some day and evening local road closures to achieve this.
“Thank you for your patience during the scheme.”
Planned road closures can be viewed on the dedicated Facebook page, M5 Junction 1 to 2 Oldbury Viaduct .