Putting an end to the crack

摘要

Wigman Road on the outskirts of Nottingham is a major thoroughfare. Just a short distance from Junction 26 of the Ml, this dual carriageway snakes through outlying residential and green-field areas to the west of the city, giving traffic, and particularly heavy goods vehicles, a largely unconjested route to the motorway and avoiding more built up routes. Wigman Road was originally built of concrete over mud flats by Italian prisoners of war in the 1940s, after which the road was subsequently black topped. However, as is the case with many roads laid back in those less frenetic times, the sheer volume of modern day usage have proved too much and city engineers have been faced with almost non-stop maintenance ever since, particularly in areas of reflective cracking where the asphalt surface passes over underlying concrete joints. As time and traffic took their toll, the city had to deal with miles of deteriorating roadway, some of it so bad that it was becoming nearly unusable.