It's 7:30 on a morning in early June, and Rhys Martin is getting ready to pull his borrowed 1964 wood-paneled Chevrolet station wagon out of the motel parking lot, then out of Needles, Calif., and into the Mojave Desert, heading east on U.S. Route 66.
Yes, that Route 66.
Martin, a travel writer and photographer from Tulsa, Okla., is here in his role as manager of the Preserve Route 66 Initiative for the National Trust for Historic Preservation. In that capacity, he's leading a caravan of about 15 vehicles along the 2,448-mi. length of Route 66, the most storied of the U.S. roads that came into being in the early days of the automobile.
Over 20 days, the Route 66 Centennial Caravan conducted a party on wheels, following the road from west to east, from Los Angeles to Chicago, celebrating 100 years since the road was established as part of the nation's new numbered highway system.
The caravan's route is in the opposite direction from the one laid out in the 1940s song that helped cement the road's role in American popular culture:
Well, it winds from Chicago to L.A.
More than 2,000 miles all the way
Get your kicks on Route 66
— "Route 66," by Bobby Troup
Starting in California had its advantages, said Martin, whose Route 66 bona fides include serving as president of the Oklahoma Route 66 Association, chair of the State Route 66 Association Working Group for the Route 66 Road Ahead Partnership, member of the Oklahoma Route 66 Centennial Commission and the Tulsa Route 66 Commission, and an advisor to the nonprofit Route 66 Alliance.
"The advantage of driving west to east is that California gets more of a fair shake when it comes to exploration. Many travelers cross the border from Arizona and try to get to the Pacific Ocean as fast as possible. By going the opposite direction, it encourages folks to linger a bit longer and see all of the great attractions and hear more of the stories in California before continuing east."
How did they build this highway a hundred years ago?
First of all, Martin and other Route 66 enthusiasts will tell you, the road wasn't built as much as it was assembled — from pieces of Native American trails and pioneer routes westward, and from rough county and state roads to railroad lines.
"One of the first myths I have to dispel with people is they think Route 66 was built," said Seth Chalmers, chair of the American Society of Civil Engineers' Arizona Section History and Heritage Committee. "It was a designation of a highway system that was already existing. It granted some realignments and improvements were made, but the road itself was pretty much there. So, it was really designated and improved rather than built.
"And as those improvements were made, then, of course, you had more people driving and could afford vehicles and it became more of an engine of commerce and tourism than it was when it first started," Chalmers said.
In contrast to the interstates that replaced the U.S. numbered highways beginning in the 1950s, Route 66's heyday was brief — a scant 30 years. But America's first motorists loved it. It offered adventure, wonder, even danger — from washouts, potholes and failed pavement.
Jim Grey photo
The eight states it crossed — Illinois, Missouri, Kansas, Texas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Arizona and California — hyped Route 66 to bring in tourists and generate tax revenue. It became "Mother Road," thanks to John Steinbeck and "Grapes of Wrath," in which the highway conveyed the impoverished Joad family from Oklahoma to California. Its diagonal configuration encouraged the growing trucking industry. An expansive and exuberant popular culture gave it icon status.
For the road-building industry, it was a challenge to develop better kinds of pavements and roads.
"We had smart engineers," said Mike O'Leary, who has worked in the asphalt industry since the 1980s. "They had to figure out how to build a road in the desert and how to build a road in the mountains."
Route 66 and its siblings were where engineers and builders learned how to keep those jittery early cars on the road and in one piece.
History
Jim Ross photo
From the front window of his house, Jim Ross has a clear view of Route 66.
Ross, a writer, photographer and Route 66 preservationist, modeled his red-brick house in Arcadia, Okla., after a 1930 Phillips 66 service station that still stands in nearby Chandler, Okla. Chandler was one of hundreds of small towns that Route 66 was created to connect.
In 1952, he said, the original Route 66 alignment was bypassed "in favor of an improved alignment around the other side of the hill."
After nearly 100 years, the road in front of Ross' house is in enviable shape.
"Its' survivability is a combination of the concrete base beneath the asphalt and the light traffic it has seen since its bypass in 1952," he said.
When America launched the highway-building boom that created Route 66, there were about 2.5 million mi. of road. Only 1.29 percent were paved. Establishing a national network of roads was seen as a way to move military hardware and the mail around the country. The latter was a goal of the groundbreaking 1916 Federal Aid Road Act. It authorized matching federal funds for improving rural roads over five years.
"The problem with the 1916 bill is that it didn't require the highways to be connected," Chalmers said.
That was rectified in legislation which passed in 1921. It also increased federal support for highways, including funds for improvements.
"That was the first five-year federal program to give the states a certain amount of money to do road projects," Chalmers said. "It gave the money to the states and the territories to say, 'you can count on this money so you can plan these highways.'"
The numbering system was introduced in 1926. North-south routes ended in "1,' with east-west routes in "0." The route that became Route 66 followed a largely diagonal course. Its fate was decided when backers prevailed in their choice of the snappy Route 66 over the bland Route 62.
Surfaces
Jim Grey photo
"Route 66 was mud to begin with," said Mike O'Leary, based in New Mexico. "People got out there on the road and got stuck."
"When the Department of Highways was established, roads could not be taken for granted, especially in rainy seasons, and the speed limit often was dictated by a horse's gallop," Oklahoma's Department of Transportation wrote during the department's centenary in 2011.
But improvements were already under way.
"The roads Missourians drove over were mostly dirt — or mud or dust, depending on the season," according to "Roads and their Builders," published by the Missouri State Highway Commission in 1971. "They were mostly bad, too — until the arrival on the scene of D. Ward King and his split log drag. And if they didn't lift Missourians out of the mud, they at least smoothed it over."
Patented in 1908, the simple split log drag machine removed clods from the road with its first log and smoothed the road with the second log.
It was a slow-motion era, Chalmers said.
"Everybody was going about 15 miles per hour," he said. "So, you didn't have to worry about it when cars ran into each other on the road."
"Prior to paving, most were dirt roads improved with drainage. Those were followed by gravel and drain," Ross said, adding that, early on, if a road was paved, it was likely in an urban area — "mostly in brick."
Although Route 66 was a priority, paving it still took 10 years to complete.
"There was no model for these roads or pavements," Ross says. The job went to Portland concrete, which was used largely in the east; and asphalt was favored in the west.
In Arcadia, Okla., a stretch of concrete road gave way to asphalt with concrete edges — or vice versa. They were laid within a year of each other in the late 1920s.
The meeting point is about one-half mile from Ross' house.
"These were two separate road projects," he says, one concrete, one asphalt.
The stretch of road carries a marker erected by the National Register of Historic Places. It notes the "unique stretch of road" beneath the wheels of passersby.
Regulations in Oklahoma called for a "uniform standard" of pavement.
According to the Oklahoma State Historic Preservation Office, "The paving standard of 18 feet in 1925 was not increased to 20 feet until 1930, therefore some 18-foot-wide roadways were built, though the majority of paving projects occurred after 1930 … . Route 66 was paved piecemeal as matching federal funds became available."
"A less popular choice was a design consisting of a 2-inch asphalt driving surface over a 5-inch concrete base. The design was built in both 18- and 20-foot widths, and in most cases included 9-inch concrete edges," according to the Oklahoma Route 66 Roadbed Documentation Project, conducted by the Oklahoma Route 66 Association in 2001-2002. Ross was a member consultant on the project.
"Generally, selection of materials depended on sub-grade factors, availability and funding," it added.
Part of New Deal
Jim Grey photo
Much of the period during which Route 66 was paved coincided with the Great Depression of the 1930s.
"Teams of mules and many men struggled with heavy equipment to accomplish the feat," recalled "Route 66 in Oklahoma: An Historic Preservation Survey."
The New Deal's Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) and the Works Progress Administration (WPA) provided workers to build the road, according to the National Park Service.
"Road improvements and maintenance work were central features of the New Deal's Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) and Works Project Administration (WPA) programs," it wrote. "From 1933 to 1938, thousands of unemployed men and youths from virtually every state were put to work as laborers on road gangs."
"At that time, the New Mexico Department of Transportation did a lot of their own construction, Chalmers said. "They had their own equipment: hydraulic bulldozers, concrete mixers, batch plants. So, a lot of that technology already existed. I think a lot of that was based on the railroads."
Meanwhile, the Oklahoma Department of Transportation website shows the construction in 1919 of the first section of what would become Route 66 in Oklahoma, with a "water-bound macadam surface, macadam base and 'Topeka asphalt' surface placed near the state capitol."
"The first concrete pavement (with exposed concrete surface) was a 7.825 lane-mile section placed in 1922 from Tulsa to Catoosa," according to roadsandbridges.com.
Missouri declared its stretch of Route 66 fully paved in 1931. That March, the Laclede County Republican, of Lebanon, Mo., reported on a celebration of the completed road.
At the gathering, Charles U. Becker, Missouri's then secretary of state, recalled the situation a dozen years earlier, "when Missouri still was 'in the mud' … and the road system then was a helter-skelter maze of country roads, 'nothing more than a disconnected chain of cow paths.'"
And Gov. Henry S. Caufield spoke of the expenditure of $12 million to bring Highway 66 to its "present state of perfection."
Improvements, Innovations
"Highway designers intended to make Route 66 'modern' in every sense of the term," according to the National Parks Service. "State engineers worked to reduce the number of curves, widen lanes and ensure all-weather capability."
"All of a sudden we needed all these roads, and they're just mud paths," Chalmers said.
"From a civil engineering standpoint, there's a lot of things that we had to develop. We had engineering principles from the railroads, but we didn't necessarily have those engineering principles for vehicles. The automobile was totally different," he added.
"For guardrails, the technology has changed a lot. Before it was, 'hey, make it real sturdy.' Now we have guardrails that basically absorb energy, and they put you back on the road. It's actually safer for you to hit the guardrail than it is to go off the road."
Engineers introduced grade separations where roads crossed railroad tracks.
And super elevation was developed to keep cars on the road when they're driving on a curve.
As cars improved and their speeds increased, "a lot of people died on curves," Chalmers said. "You go around a horizontal curve — super elevations are where you warp the curve, so you don't fly off of it.
"People come in too hot on a curve. There's not enough friction, and there's not enough super elevation."
"Or you have a long straight section of the roadway. And all of a sudden have a curve at it. You know you're going to get crashes at that curve, especially with impaired drivers.
"So vertical geometry had to be developed and the idea of stopping sight distance, where the driver has enough time to react and stop or maneuver."
Core History
Jim Grey photo
In New Mexico, the asphalt industry is drilling into Route 66 and extracting the road's history, Mike O'Leary said. The goal is to recycle the materials.
"Extract a core, and along with the road mix and asphalt, you'll see chip seals and new recycled mixes that go on top of them," he said. "You might also see macadam, and an asphaltic mix of a couple of inches."
Asphalt and aggregates have become valuable. On Highway 6, part of the original Route 66 alignment, workers use milling machines to recycle the pavement in place.
"It's cost-effective," O'Leary said. "They lay it down on the same spot. It's a full-circle use of our assets. In the past we threw that away."
A Route 66 aficionado himself, O'Leary said he'll be making a trip on the highway later this year, taking to the road in his 1937 Chevrolet. Back when his car came off the assembly line, laying asphalt was a more rudimentary operation.
"In the West, making a hot mix plant on site was unusual. So, they'd lay aggregate on a stretch of pavement and poured on liquid asphalt. It got the traveling public out of the mud."
Awards
Route 66 was decommissioned in 1985, having been supplanted by the Interstate Highway System. In the West, Interstate 40 replaced Route 66.
But the old road didn't disappear.
In 1999, the American Concrete Pavement Association presented a Lifetime Pavement Award to Route 66 in Oklahoma, according to Roads & Bridges. com. Citing the award, Neal McCaleb, then U.S. secretary of transportation, said the section was "clearly built to last."
"This slab has borne the wheels of commerce for over 65 years, and is still functional, as are the 400 miles of Route 66 that remain a part of the fabric of our state highway system today," he added, according to Roads & Bridges.com.
Jim Grey photo
In 2025, the New Mexico Department of Transportation received the Perpetual Pavement Award from the Asphalt Pavement Alliance and the Asphalt Pavement Association of New Mexico, recognizing a 9 mi. section of New Mexico Route 6 — part of the original Route 66 alignment opened in 1928.
Dan Lewis, executive director of the Asphalt Pavement Association of New Mexico, said, "With this award, we're celebrating the folks who designed and built this incredible road."
In a statement, the association said, "Through innovative asphalt technologies and careful preservation, the roadway remains both historically authentic and structurally sound — never once experiencing a structural failure."
The interstate system was in development as far back as the 1930s, Chalmers said. The U.S. routes made it clear that access control was important. They ran through the center of every town they connected, clogging traffic.
"It was very inefficient for interstate travel," he said.
"We had engineering principles from the railroads, but we didn't necessarily have those engineering principles for vehicles," he continued. "There's a lot of things that we had to develop."
Martin said, "Route 66 was a victim of its own success." States promoted it. The public loved it. And then there was too much traffic for the road to carry.
It turns out that the Interstate Highway System didn't put Route 66 entirely out of business. Icons don't go out of business easily. Driving the road became a destination in itself. For the construction industry, Route 66 is a 2,448-mile model of the changes in the ways American highways are built.
One hundred years after it was given its number, Route 66 carried Rhys Martin and his caravan of devotees into Chicago. The 1964 wood-paneled Chevrolet station wagon "held up wonderfully and continued to turn heads across the corridor," he said in mid-July.
This was his first time driving the entire route in a single trip, he said, "and the thing I learned about it is just how intense the trip can be, even for a long-time roadie like myself. Even though we were on the road for three weeks, it wasn't nearly enough time. I came home with a greater appreciation for the corridor as a whole."
Route 66, Martin said, "still has value. For the last 30 years it's been growing every year."
