Fresh calls in Shropshire to make 20-mile section of A5 a dual carriageway

Campaigners believe the section of road running from the outskirts of Shrewsbury at Churncote up to the junction with the A483 at Gledrid in North Wales should be expanded to be two lanes in both directions.

Members of Weston Rhyn Parish Council have pledged to write to North Shropshire MP Owen Paterson over the issue, claiming the stretch is the last remaining section of an official TransEuropean Highway running from the ports of Dover and Felixstowe in the south east to Holyhead, which is not a dual carriageway.

They have claimed the road is now totally inadequate for the volume of traffic travelling from Ireland and industrial areas of north east Wales.

It comes after the Government announced plans to invest £15 billion in a major nationwide road building programme. Councillors in north Shropshire believe a project involving the A5, including the Oswestry and Chirk bypasses, should have been included.

The fresh bid has been made as maps detailing the proposed route of a link road between the M54 and M6 and M6 Toll were made public.

Currently the A5 is a dual carriageway from junction seven of the M54 at Wellington until the Churncote roundabout on the western edge of Shrewsbury. It then becomes single track except for the Nesscliffe bypass. Last month a man was killed in a collision between a car and a lorry less than a mile from Weston Rhyn.

The most recent figures for accident statistics show that from 1997 to 2008 there were eight fatalities on the A5 from Dovaston, north of Nesscliffe to Chirk, a distance of around 13.5 miles. In the same period on the same stretch of the A5 there were 190 serious accidents and 197 slight accidents.

One of the most dramatic of crashes involved a car and a cattle truck. Two drivers were killed along with cows who escaped from the truck to plunge to their deaths over a bridge over the River Ceiriog, again close to the village of Weston Rhyn.