Contractors Under Way With Wairakei Road Diversion

Taupo Times, Volume XIV, Issue 56, 20 July 1965, Page 1

Contractors Under Way With Wairakei Road Diversion

Contrac tor's heavy machinery is making deep bites into the high banks surrounding the TaupoWairakei stretch of State Highway No 1 above the control gate bridge over the Waikato River just out of Taupo. It is the first job in the-re-construction of the road to Wairakei and work will progress from the Taupo end. The deviation will be a motorway over a distance of four miles three chains, reducing the distance over the the present road to Wairakei by half a mile. There will be only eight gradual curves over the distance compared with about twenty, some of them bad corners, on the old road.

The steepest part of the reconstruction will be above the bridge, with a rise of lft. in 13.3ft. At the Wairakei end there will be a 1 in 19 gradient down to the junction with the old road at a point near the second tee of the Wairakei golf course. That part of the road already being worked on is from the bridge to just below Poihipi Road. Two large earth moving machines, a grader, bulldozers and other machinery and vehicles are being used by the Rotorua contractors, Taylor and Culley, Ltd. Contractors have been given instructions to complete this first stretch of the road as soon as possible and it will probably be finished by the end of December. The whole job will cost £293,000.