US-66: why not Penn Pike?

The Smithsonian Museum in Washington DC is acquiring a dozen 5 ton slabs of the old pavement of US-66 for an exhibit “America on the Move.” Early Dec the American Trucking Assoc arranged to have historic hunks of US-66 concrete pried out the ground in Geary OK for transport on flatbed trucks 1400mi to the Smithsonian warehouse here in MD. US-66 was built with two 3m (10') lanes in 1931, and where it remains in OK it is being rebuilt to modern 3.65m (12') standards.

So what’s being done to preserve some of the 1939-vintage pavement of the equally historic Pennsylvania Turnpike, also undergoing its first full rebuild-from-dirt-up? Most of the old concrete pavement is being ‘rubbelized’ for sub-base for the new asphalt mainslab. It doesn’t need to be shipped to Wash DC, but the Pennsylvania Turnpike Commission could perhaps preserve and restore one section of the original roadway together with an original toll plaza and late-30s signage and roadside furniture as a turnpike museum? And perhaps one of its specialty truck turning-over loops at an IC? And one of those tight 12' clearance overpasses?

The Penn Pike and the major toll roads that followed did a heck of a lot more for American mobility than the over-ballyhooed ‘sixty-six,’ a murderously ill-designed, slow 2-laner that spawned endless roadside tackiness almost all the way between Chicago and Los Angeles. It was all they had in the 1940s and 1950s. US-66 was thankfully put out of business by I-10, I-40, I-44 (Oklahoma’s Will Rogers and Turner turnpikes) and I-55. Indeed quite a bit of that Chicago-LA traffic now uses the Kansas Turnpike (I-35.) Only a strange nostalgia cult survives the horrible junk-road that was US-66!