New South Wales Road Photo Gallery:
National Route 1 (Pacific Highway) (Brunswick Heads to Yelgun Upgrade)

The Pacific Highway, one of Australia’s busiest and most important road links, passes through the heart of residential, farming and retail areas of many towns along the New South Wales coast between Hexham, northwest of the industrial city of Newcastle, to the NSW-QLD Border at Tweed Heads, about 90 minutes south of Brisbane, the capital of Queensland.

The route's southern terminus is located at the junction of the Pacific Highway (SR111) and the New England Highway (NH1) at Hexham, 16 km northwest of Newcastle, which is north of Sydney. The northern terminus is at the New South Wales / Queensland border, just west of the town centre of Tweed Heads. The route itself is a mix of freeway, arterial and rural highway standards. The highway has been progressively upgraded over the years, however since the late 1980s, an accelerated upgrade program has been undertaken. Despite the acceleration program, only approximately 40% of the highway is of dual carriageway.

This page looks at the 2006 / 2007 upgrade of the highway in the Brunswick Heads area.

The upgrade of the highway in this vicinity began with the by-passing of the Brunswick Heads town centre, which opened to traffic on 5 June 1998, removing a renowned holiday bottleneck from the Brunswick Heads township. This upgrade in itself has an interesting past, because the original contractor for the work went into voluntary administration. This stage of the highway upgrades in the area was done as a single carriageway, at a cost of $17 million.

The first stage of the upgrade provided a 3.4 km bypass of Brunswick Heads including two bridges, fauna underpasses and wildlife fencing. This stage, when completed in 1998, used a single carriageway with at-grade intersections. The completed bypass will be dual carriageways with full grade-separated interchanges at the northern and southern ends of the project.

This second next stage, is part of the Brunswick Heads to Yelgun project, realigning old sections of highway not upgraded in the by-pass of the town centre, and also duplicating the works that opened in 1998. This upgrade covers an 8.6 kilometre section of the Pacific Highway between the Brunswick Heads South Interchange and the southern end of the Yelgun to Chinderah Freeway. For more details and a photo gallery during construction, click here. The photos below, concentrate on this stage of the upgrade. For a map of the upgrade area, click here (map courtesy of RTA).

Length (NR1):	679 km
Internal RTA Classification:	State Highway 10
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Information courtesy of the NSW Roads and Traffic Authority