It's almost fifty years since the opening of the first motorway in the United Kingdom - the M6 Preston Bypass, but it seemed likely that this magical date for British transport history was to go unnoticed until recently.

I doubt people using the M6 between junctions 29 and 32 on December 5th, 2008 will realise the importance of that date, indeed, they'll probably be more likely to be cursing as they become stuck in the annual chaos that is the pre-Christmas traffic rush which frequently plagues the motorway throughout Lancashire.

Despite the bypass now being what engineers call a dual four lane motorway, it still manages to suffer serious congestion owing to the bypass' pivotal status for the entire Lancashire motorway network, with the M65, M61, and M55 motorways all merging and diverging within ten miles of each other.

So why would Britain's youngest City require all these motorways to meet around its outskirts? Why did the first motorway get built here rather than near to London or Birmingham? The answer is surprisingly simple - Preston was one of the most fearsome traffic bottlenecks in the whole country during the 1950s. It suffered from being crossed by three trunk routes, the A6, A59, and A583. The A6 took all the strain of north-south traffic, including holidaymakers to the Lake District, and freight to Scotland. The A59 trunk route transported traffic from the docks of Liverpool to Preston, before heading east to Halifax, and the A583 took dozens of tourists to the shores of Blackpool.

All three of these major roads used to meet in the centre of Preston - indeed the A59 used to run along Fishergate. It is quite difficult to imagine one of the main shopping streets of the city being blocked by dozens of cars and lorries belching black smoke, but this was the reality of 1950s Preston.

The Ministry of Transport had to do something about this clearly undesirable situation. In the mid 1950s construction on an eight mile bypass from the A6 at Bamber Bridge to the A6 at Broughton was started. This road was to be like no other in the country. There were already dual carriageways in Lancashire, but none were like what was being built - a road with a design speed of 70 mph, no interruptions to traffic on the mainline, all other roads crossing over or under the road and never on the level, and a brand new system of direction signs. It epitomised Harold Macmillan’s "Never Had It So Good" belief.

When the road finally opened it revolutionised the area, and traffic used to the slog up the old A6 was actually passing the city in less than eight minutes when journeys could take well over an hour in the past. This was a hugely successful road despite some early setbacks such as the carriageways freezing during the winter of early 1959.

However, the Preston Bypass was to become a victim of its own success. The Ministry had only built the motorway as dual two lane, and as the M6 grew in both directions, these two lanes became a bottleneck. During the mid-1960s, the bypass was widened to dual three lanes by removing the wide central reservation. For a while this had solved the problem, until 1974 when the original end of the bypass at Broughton was extended westwards as the new M55 Blackpool Motorway. This had the advantage of finally removing all the Blackpool traffic from the centre of Preston, as until then it was still forced to use the A583 out from what is now the Riversway Docklands development.

Traffic was removed from the city centre, but this traffic was now routed onto the M6, which was already markedly busier as in 1969 the M61 had opened, bringing traffic from Manchester and Chorley within commuting distance of Preston. At Walton Summit, where the M61 and M6 met there was the awkward situation of six lanes merging into three, and despite the best tinkering efforts with the lane layouts, which eventually saw the northbound M6 become two lanes through junction 30, and the northbound M61 become one lane, there was nothing but congestion from the 1970s onwards.

At the other end of the bypass, the M6 reduced to two lanes to fit through the Broughton Interchange, which resulted in chaos every summer weekend as traffic struggled through to get to Blackpool. The M6 was barely twenty years old and it was already rapidly becoming a hated figure - the Preston Bypass was a major congestion headache. Plans were considered for a series of western bypasses for the city, to reduce the demand on the M6.

However, as the economy started to go wrong during the mid-1970s, ambitious motorway projects were put on hold. Queues at Preston simply got longer. The dream of congestion free motorways seemed to be turning into more of a nightmare by the day.

Then suddenly it seemed as if a miracle had been realised - in 1993, cones appeared on the bypass, and over the next two years the entire motorway was ripped up and replaced by a brand new dual four lane superhighway, with every single structure between the M61 and M55 being replaced. This was a tremendous project and it changed the M6 here forever. Gone were all the original bridges - except for one south of the M61, gone was the awful merge at junction 30 itself, and gone were the famous 'loops' at the Samlesbury Interchange which was replaced with a more conventional junction that required two new bridges across the River Ribble.

In October 1995 the widening was complete - the new motorway was fast, it was huge, and it was a complete polar opposite of the original in terms of design. It even featured a brand new junction for the expanding industrial areas to the east of the city. However, the junction at Broughton was left as only two through lanes - which has proven to be a bottleneck as lorries are forced to move into the right hand lanes, and owing to the gradient approaching the interchange these lorries are traveling at around 45 mph. Queues are still frequent here unfortunately.

In 1997, the original terminal junction at Bamber Bridge was rebuilt to accommodate the new M65 from Blackburn, which meant another part of the motorway's history had been consigned to the history books.

Drivers on the motorway today will not recognise it if they were only familiar with the original. Whilst it has become a much more modern road, it is regrettable that the country's first motorway was not given a more prominent memorial to celebrate its turbulent history.

As this brief history lesson has shown, the M6 is clearly an underappreciated stretch of road - Lancashire would be lost without it, yet we are all first to criticise it when it gets closed due to yet another accident or because there's too many of us driving on it to get home in time for the football. We simply treat it as a lump of tarmac for us to get to work quicker. It is much more than that - it is as much a part of our transport heritage as Stephenson's Rocket, the Channel Tunnel, Spitfires, and the Concorde.