The two-lane section of UT 7 (MP 6-26) between St. George and Hurricane is fully signed with BGSs and freeway-style exits.
But somewhat more obscure is the one and only numbered exit on UT 10 just south of Castle Dale. The grade separation presumbly is to accommodate the huge number of huge coal trucks going to and from the pictured plant:
There's an even weirder grade separation on Utah 57, the cross street at that interchange,
where it intersects Utah 29 several miles north of there. That one doesn't have any exit numbers or BGS type signage though.
UDOT almost as a rule does not build interchanges off of obvious freeway or expressway alignments, so these two stick out like a sore thumb. Also, UDOT has almost never built bypasses of towns on major highways (see places like Vernal, Moab, Heber, and Logan until recently)...yet SR 57 has a bypass of Orangeville, a small insignificant town that usually would never even be considered for this type of thing. Both interchanges and the bypass opened in the late 1970s, at the same time as the road from SR 29 up to the Wilberg Mine was converted from a local to collector functional class (it has since been added to 57). The likely story here is that Wilberg re-opened in 1978 after being dormant for several years, and most of the coal mined there is trucked down to that power plant right off 10.
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Topic: Freeway exit signs on two-lane roads (Read 2950 times)