Tom Fraser, the Minister of Transport, opened the 10½-mile Darlington bypass motorway – the A1(M) – and the 2-mile Spur Link road – the A66(M).
There had been talk of bypassing the town since 1929, when a new bridge over the Tees at Blackwell was proposed to connect with a widened Carmel Road, but this scheme was scuppered by the economic depression of the 1930s.
After the war, a motorway was proposed from Kneeton Corner, near Scotch Corner, to the delightfully named Crumbley Corner in County Durham. The route would follow the old trackbed of the Merrybent mineral railway, passing through Barton limestone quarry. The only building that required bulldozing was the former Barton station.
The 12½ miles of motorway required thirty-four bridges, 3.75 million cubic yards of earthworks and the alteration of 9½ miles of side roads. The controversial Conservative Minister of Transport, Ernest Marples, cut the first sod in May 1963, but following the 1964 General Election, it was his Labour successor who declared the £6.5 million project open. For the first time since the Romans had bypassed Darlington nearly 2,000 years earlier, the town was no longer on the main highway between London and Edinburgh.
However, in Stapleton, where the A66(M) had removed all the traffic, residents complained that they could no longer get to sleep because their village was too quiet.
(F.A. Sims: The Motorway Achievement: Building the Network in the North-East of England)