The Walloon Motorway, from One Millennium to Another

The Walloon motorway is the east-west axis in the southern part of Belgium linking the north of France to the southwest of Germany. It was built in the beginning of the 1970’s as a part of the Belgian motorway development program. The design traffic was about 10.000 vehicles a day with a percentage of 5 to 10% of heavy vehicles and was expected to be doubled between 1970 and 2000. For the greater part, this motorway was built of 20 cm continuously reinforced concrete, an intermediate layer of 6 cm asphalt and a lean concrete roadbase, which was a typical road structure for motorway construction in those days. The use of a slipform paver was a première in Belgium and surprised the road professionals by the even surface that was obtained and by the steady and fast progress of the machine. Both the Road Administration and the contractor had made a study trip to the U.S. to learn about the techniques of CRCP and slipform paving. Today, after 35 years of service with hardly any maintenance and with an average daily traffic of over 15.000 heavy vehicles a day, this motorway is still in a very good condition and deserves to be named a successful long-life pavement.