GREAT HIGHWAY

Wairarapa Times-Age, 8 July 1938, Page 7

GREAT HIGHWAY

LINK BETWEEN BRITAIN AND INDIA. AN EIGHT THOUSAND MILE ROUTE. A modern highway linking Great Britain, Belgium. Germany, Austria, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Turkey, Syria, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan and India will soon be an accomplished fact and it will be possible to motor in comfort the 8000 miles from Bombay to London. At a luncheon given by the Western India Automobile Associatiofi in Bombay, Mr H. E. Ormerod, president of the association, said it was proposed that the road, which at present had been completed as far as Istanbul, except for a short stretch, should be extended through Anatolia and Syria, and then on through Araq, Iran and Afghanistan to India, and in this manner through Delhi to Calcutta and Bombay. Mr Ormerod added that one of the most important items on the agenda of the conference of the Alliance Internationale de Tourisme, was consideration of the progress made by the Western India Automobile Association would be represented at the conference by a member of its committee, Mr Alastair Macßae. Mr A. H. C. Sykes, secretary of the association, said that in 1933 the Automobile Association surveyed the whole length of the route from London to Istanbul in collaboration with a British car expedition. With the enthusiastic support of the Alliance Internationale de Tourisme, a group of motoring organisations having now an aggregate membership of over 10,000,000 and with the whole-hearted co-opera-tion of the Governments of the countries through which the route passed, the work of reconstruction and modernisation was soon commenced. It has proceeded rapidly since, and it is now possible to reach Istanbul from London in five days’ easy motoring.