Aplank road is aroad composed ofwooden planks orpuncheon logs, as an efficient technology for traversing soft, marshy, or otherwise difficult ground. Plank roads have been built since antiquity, and were commonly found in the Canadian province ofOntario as well as theNortheast andMidwest of the United States in the first half of the 19th century. They were often built byturnpike companies.
TheWittmoor bog trackway is the name given to each of two historic plank roads orboardwalks, trackway No. I being discovered in 1898 and trackway No. II in 1904[1] in theWittmoorbog in northernHamburg, Germany. The trackways date to the 4th and 7th century AD, both linked the eastern and western shores of the formerly inaccessible, swampy bog. A part of the older trackway No. II dating to the period of theRoman Empire is on display at the permanent exhibition of theArchaeological Museum Hamburg inHarburg, Hamburg.[2][3]
This type of plank road is known to have been used asearly as 4,000 BC with, for example, thePost Track found in theSomerset levels nearGlastonbury, England.[4] This type of road was also constructed inRoman times.[citation needed]
From the mid-1840s and to mid 1850s, the United States experienced thePlank Road Boom and a subsequent bust. The first plank road in the US was built inNorth Syracuse, New York, to transport salt and other goods;[5] it appears to have copied earlier roads in Canada, which had copied Russian ones.[6] The plank road boom, like many other early technologies, promised to transform the way people lived and worked and led to permissive changes in legislation seeking to spur development, speculative investment by private individuals, etc. Ultimately, the technology failed to live up to its promise, and millions of dollars in investments evaporated almost overnight.[6]
Three plank roads, theHackensack, thePaterson, and theNewark, were major arteries in northernNew Jersey. The roads travelled over theNew Jersey Meadowlands, connecting the cities for which they were named to theHudson River waterfront.
U.S. Route 1 in Virginia follows the Boydton Plank Road from Petersburg southwards to just north of the North Carolina line.
On the U.S. West Coast theCanyon Road ofPortland, Oregon was another important but short artery and was built between 1851 and 1856.
Kingston Road (Toronto) (Governor's Road) andDanforth Avenue, inToronto, were plank roads built by theDon and Danforth Plank Road Company in the late 18th and the early 19th centuries.Highway 2 from Toronto eastwards was a plank road in the 19th century that was later paved. In 1833Scarborough-Markham Plank Road was authorized to build a road from Danforth Road to Highway 7 to Ringwood and east on Stouffville Road to Main Street Stouffville.
Plank roads are used exclusively in the Canadian fishingoutport ofHarrington Harbour,Quebec because the town is built directly over a hilly, rocky shore. ATVs are the only mode of transportation there.
InPerth,Western Australia, plank roads were important in the early growth of the agricultural and outer urban areas because of the distances imposed by swamps and the relatively-infertile soil. As it cost £2,000/km to construct roads by conventional means, the local councils, known as road boards, were experimenting with cheaper approaches to road building. A method called JandakotCorduroy had been developed atJandakot south-east of Perth: ajarrah tramway lay upon 2.3-metre-long (7.5 ft)sleepers, bounded by two 70-centimetre-wide (28 in) strips of jarrah planks for cart and carriage wheels. The 90-centimetre (35 in) gap was filled with limestone rubble to be used by horses. This reduced the cost of road building by up to 85% after its widespread introduction in 1908.[7] However, increased traffic and suburban development rendered the routes unsatisfactory over time, and by the 1950s, they had been replaced withbitumen surfaced roads.
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