Most Len roads were never meant to be permanent

Well they've lived up to their statement.

cheers

Dunc

Candace - The style of construction of Len Beadells "roads" is the most basic of all the types of construction access - a simply graded track, with no effort involved to raise the road level, nor provide any form of drainage.

To construct a road, the area to be driven on must be raised, and drainage installed.
Where watercourses are crossed, culverts must be installed for small water flows, and bridges installed for larger water flows.

Building a road sub-base formation involves moving and mixing substantial amounts of soil, from the edges of the road alignment, to the centre of the road.
Then, suitable road base material containing the right mixture of clay, sand, and small pebbles, which binds to form a hard driving surface when wetted, must be laid on top of the road sub-base formation.

All of this involves substantial monetary outlay, which has to be recovered via taxes, or directly from road users.
In areas of low population levels, the cost of even basic gravel road construction runs into tens of thousands of dollars per km - and this level of expenditure cannot be justified for low traffic numbers.

Very few people outside Australia, understand that Australia does not have the population to support the cost of construction and maintenance, of an extensive road system throughout the centre of Australia - unlike America.

Australia is highly regarded world-wide, for its skills in construction of low-cost roads that perform very satisfactorily.
Unfortunately, many of the earlier roads in Australia were too narrow - all due to trying to keep construction costs down - and also keeping in mind that traffic levels were low when they were built - so passing other vehicles, by moving onto the shoulder occasionally, was acceptable.

However, in recent years, major improvements have been made to most roads in Australia by widening and increased levels of sealing.
We will never be able to reach the levels of the American Interstate Highways network, because we only have 7.5% of the population of America, for the same total continental land area - but I think we have a reasonably satisfactory road network, for our population level.

Of course, one could argue, that if the amounts of money wasted on frivolous Defence projects had been redirected to road construction, we could've had a lot more substantial highways criss-crossing Australia!

Cheers, Ron.

I agree 'Len' roads were specific to the requirements of military purposes, which are always of relatively short term.
As time went by they were heavily used for National mapping projects. len makes mention of meeting fledgling mapping agencies and oil exploration teams while driving forth the government project.
Also Len was aware of these other projects and mentioned care with his access to points to trig points for future use.
Len was on the money and I grateful that his work made suitable drives for the Aussie weekender.
It's not to say though that the 'Len' treks are not under some threat of renaming,lock up and other conditions imposed for Machiavellian reasons. To an extent, it is already happening and as for the future, I hope there are still some folk interested to keep the status quo..

.
Hi Candace,

The 'roads' loosely called the Beadell tracks were part of the Anglo-Australian Joint Project 1946–1980 which was an alliance between the British and Australian governments to produce rocket propelled armaments ostensibly to protect Britain from attack together with nuclear tests at Emu Field and Maralinga. The Americans were also engaged in similar activity but had no confidence in the British security reliability so refused to share their research or weapons.

The test range at Woomera began construction in 1949 without an end-date determination. Nobody knew how long this initiative would last. Although Len Beadell was engaged at Emu and Maralinga surveying and advising, the roads associated in that area were established by military personnel and it was not until 1953 that Len formed the Gunbarrel Road Construction Party and began in earnest to survey and construct the network of roads that were to be used for the National Mapping Council geodetic survey and for locating instrumentation sites for the rocket trials. This work continued until the late sixties when America found trust in Britain who then purchased armaments from America and abandoned their own research. It was something of a shock to the Australian government and public.
So it can be seen that there were no recognised use-by dates for those Beadell roads. In fact, their construction was rather ad hoc.

The legacy of all this left a heap of tracks that now service cattle stations and Aboriginal communities and a great playground for 4WD and camping enthusiasts.
But they now serve little for the original intention of defence development.