Calder Highway

South of the Victoria/New South Wales border the highway is a dual-lane, single-carriageway road, continuing through northwest Victoria from the Abbotsford Bridge, through Merbein to the major regional town of Mildura, where it is 2 lanes each way through southern Mildura and Irymple, in the state's north-west. Here also it crosses the Sturt Highway (A20) leading to capital cities Adelaide heading west and Sydney heading east. Further south, it crosses the Mallee Highway (B12) at Ouyen and runs south-east eventually to Bendigo. Between Red Cliffs and Wycheproof the highway has a speed limit of 110 km/h.

The Calder Alternate Highway (A790) connects to the Calder Highway at either end - just north of Ravenswood, and at Marong - and provides a bypass west of Bendigo.

For most of its length from Ravenswood to the junction with the Tullamarine Freeway in Melbourne, the Calder Freeway is a four-lane dual-carriageway freeway which bypasses the towns along the former alignment of the highway.

The northern end of the freeway shares a concurrency with the Midland Highway (A300), from Bendigo until south of Harcourt, where it resumes south-westerly to the major regional centres of Castlemaine, Ballarat, and Geelong.

Towns bypassed by, but still accessible from, the Calder Freeway include Harcourt, Elphinstone, Taradale, Malmsbury, Kyneton, Woodend, Macedon, Gisborne, and Diggers Rest.

The freeway ends at the interchange with the Tullamarine Freeway, the main route to Melbourne's central business district to Melbourne Airport.

Within the urban section of the Calder Freeway (between Kings Road and the Tullamarine Freeway), the standard travel time, in each direction, is 10 minutes. (5 minutes between Kings Road and the Western Ring Road and 5 minutes between the Western Ring Road and the Tullamarine Freeway.

The usual peak period travel time, is between 9–13 minutes. However, when there is extreme congestion or roadworks, including being residual from an incident, the travel time can go beyond 13 minutes, sometimes upwards of 20 minutes plus.

The passing of the Highways and Vehicles Act of 1924[2] through the Parliament of Victoria provided for the declaration of State Highways, roads two-thirds financed by the State government through the Country Roads Board (later VicRoads). The North-Western Highway was declared a State Highway on 1 July 1925,[3] cobbled from a collection of roads from Melbourne through Kyneton, Castlemaine, Bendigo, Sea Lake and Ouyen to Mildura (for a total of 324 miles); before this declaration, the road between Melbourne and Bendigo was referred to as (Main) Bendigo Road or Melbourne-Bendigo Road.[4]

The North-Western Highway was renamed the Calder Highway in 1928, after William Calder, chairman of the Country Roads Board from 1913-28.[5] In the 1959/60 financial year, another section from Elphinstone to Harcourt was added as a deviation bypassing Castlemaine, along the former Elphinstone-Harcourt Road[6] (already having been declared a Main Road by the Country Roads Board in 1937/38 financial year[7]); the previous alignments of the Calder Highway from Elphinstone to Castlemaine, and Castlemaine to Harcourt, were subsumed into the Pyrenees Highway and Midland Highway respectively. The Calder Alternative Highway was declared in June 1983, along the former Ravenswood-Marong Road.[8][9]

The Calder Highway was later signed National Route 79 in 1955; when the Midland Highway was allocated State Route 149 in 1986, it shared a concurrency along the Calder Highway between Harcourt and Bendigo. With Victoria's conversion to the newer alphanumeric system in the late 1990s this was altered to an A79 designation for the highway portion, and a M79 designation for the freeway portion into Melbourne (and the concurrency with Midland Highway was replaced with route A300); the New South Wales section was left unallocated when they switched to the alphanumeric system in 2013. Calder Alternative Highway was signed Alternative National Route 79 between Ravenswood and Marong, and was later replaced by route A790.

Originally, the Calder Highway ran through northwestern Melbourne as an undivided highway, ultimately through Niddrie as Keilor Road and terminating in Essendon; traffic continued south along Mount Alexander Road to reach central Melbourne. Keilor Road - already heavily congested and supporting a tram line - was eventually bypassed by a freeway-standard road in 1972 to terminate at a junction with Lancefield Road (later upgraded to the Tullamarine Freeway), rejoining the Calder Highway at the western end of Niddrie;[10] the freeway-standard was extended further west to East Keilor (the future location of the Western Ring Road interchange) in 1975, and to Keilor by the early 1980s. However, it was not until the 1990s that work began to duplicate the rest of the highway to Bendigo.

The Howard government broadened the criteria under which roads qualify for Commonwealth road funding by introducing Roads of National Importance program in the 1996-97 financial year[11] where such declarations were based on the recognition that roads outside the National Highway system also provide social benefits, and were funded jointly with the States and Territories usually on a 50:50 basis. As a major road link between Melbourne, Bendigo, and the state's northwest, supporting the region's primary manufacturing and tourism industries, the Calder Highway was declared a Road of National Importance between Melbourne and Bendigo in December 1996.[12][13]

The passing of the Road Management Act 2004[14] granted the responsibility of overall management and development of Victoria's major arterial roads to VicRoads: in 2004, VicRoads re-declared the road as Calder Alternative Highway (Arterial #6200) between Ravenswood and Marong,[15] and in 2011 as Calder Highway (Arterial #6530) between the border with New South Wales at Yelta and the interchange with Calder Alternate Highway and Ravenswood Street in Ravenswood,[16] and as Calder Freeway (Freeway #1530) between Ravenswood and Tullamarine Freeway, Airport West.[17]

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  The Calder Highway, passing through Irymple.
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  The end of the Calder Highway at the intersection of the Silver City Highway, near Curlwaa, New South Wales.
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  Fruit disposal bins and warning signs along the Calder Highway, approaching the Fruit Fly Exclusion Zone near Mildura.

• Highways in Australia
• Highways in Victoria
• Freeways in Australia
• Freeways in Victoria
• Road transport in Victoria

• Timelapse footage of the Calder Freeway between Bendigo and Melbourne