TL2667 : Building the new A14
taken 7 years ago, 3 km from Hilton, Cambridgeshire, England

Oddly, this new route is a bypass for a bypass, and is bypassing the Huntingdon Bypass of the early 1970s, providing a new route from Bar Hill to Alconbury. I say "Oddly" because in my experience the worst delays on that route are on the ancient alignment of the former A604 between Bar Hill and Cambridge, which section is not being replaced. If this new road speeds up the traffic to the immediate East of the A1 that will only pile up the harder on the approach to Cambridge.
We have seen such failures of public policy before, the city of Exeter has been bypassed so many times since the introduction of the motor-car that the road map somewhat resembles the skins of an onion.
The new route will be 3 lanes wide, from bar Hill to Brampton Hut, where it will use the 2 lane bit of the original A1 to swing north to the existing A14 at Alconbury, toward the Midlands. A new bit of A1 has been built to free this final section up
The A14 is a major road which runs for 129 miles from the Port of Felixstowe to the Catthorpe Interchange, the junction of the M1 and M6 motorways near Rugby.
The route linking Rugby (and therefore the West Midlands and the north of England via the motorway network) to East Anglia and the ports of Felixstowe and Harwich is incredibly important and incredibly busy (Felixstowe is the UK's principal container port and the A14 is the road between Felixstowe and everywhere else) but it didn't exist in any coherent form until about 1992.
Prior to the current A14 the main route from Birmingham to the Haven ports followed the old A45 road via Coventry, Rugby, Northampton, St Neots, Cambridge and then through all the towns on the A14, from there to Ipswich where it ended on the A12 – not the fast route required for transporting goods across the country with the sudden rise in container shipping during the latter part of the twentieth century.
Most of the current A14 route is a collection of bits of dual carriageway acquired from other roads (most notably the A45) with occasional stretches of new road to bolt it all together. Because of its importance to the country’s economy, there are plans to upgrade it further.
Prior to its use for the current route the A14 designation had been used for a section of road between the A10 at Royston and the A1 at Alconbury following part of the route of the Roman road, Ermine Street, which is now mostly designated as the A1198. The only bit of the current A14 that follows that number's original route is the spur linking junction 23 to the A1.
LinkChris's British Road Directory
LinkWikipedia