WE don’t often get the kind of traffic congestion associated with places like London and Manchester but Cumbria’s predominance of twisting country roads has always made it a relatively slow county to drive about in.

Today’s selection of pictures show some the road projects which have made the county better connected though the years and feature a selection of the vehicles which were once a common sight in Cumbria.

The M6 through Cumbria was one of the biggest engineering projects to be carried out in the county and had to be done in stages.

Progress towards a high-speed modern road transport link from north to south was started on December 5 in 1958 with the opening of the Preston bypass as the country's first motorway.

The first part of what we know as the M6 to be finished in Cumbria was a seven-mile stretch forming the Penrith bypass which was in use from 1968.

The following year saw the completion of a three-mile section from Hackthorpe to Thrimby.

In 1970 John Peyton, Minister of Transport, cut a ribbon to open the long section of the M6 from Lancaster, over Shap, towards Penrith.

And in December 1970 the seven-mile section which provided a bypass for Carlisle was opened at a cost of £7m. The last piece of the jigsaw, a 13-mile section from Carlisle to Penrith, was opened in July 1971.

Through the 1960s Carlisle had been one of the country's worst traffic bottlenecks.

Dalton, the ancient capital of Furness, had similar problems with delivery wagons and commuter traffic bringing the town's main street to a standstill.

The rush hour crawl for motorists was not brought to an end until the town saw its bypass opened at the end of 1993.

In more recent years, it took £35.3m to build a dual-carriageway for the A590 at High and Low Newton in South Cumbria.

It opened to traffic in the spring of 2008.

Thousands of pounds can be paid for unusual car registration numbers but in 1989 Bowness driver Beverly Banks was given one for free due to a mistake at the DVLC licensing headquarters in Swansea.

The simple keyboard error gave her the registration LA23 — which matched her South Lakeland postcode — on a six-month-old Fiat Uno.

The Mail, on Monday, September 4, in 1989, said Post Office officials initially refused to tax the car as they didn't think the number plate could be right.

A spokesperson for DVLC said the odd number plate was the result of a keyboard error.

Beverly, who worked at the Belsfield Hotel in Bowness, said: "I never get this sort of luck."

The Mail article noted: "Beverly is understandably delighted at having the personalised number which could be worth thousands of pounds."