good info!
I have heard that the "great renumbering" took place any time between 1976 and 1982, which I take to mean that it was first put on paper in 1976 and the field implementation was complete by 1982. Is this correct?
is it true that the dirt roads (which 34 turns into just a few hundred feet past this photo) were not renumbered like the paved ones were, and therefore kept their old numbers, but were not to be signed, as they were officially being dropped from the system?
Some older editions of Nevada's route logs (up to at least 2001) show "authorization dates" for all the routes. Most routes list 7/1/76 as an authorization date, with no earlier dates listed. This indicates to me that the renumbering was authorized on paper on July 1, 1976.
At the time, NDOT was publishing new state maps every two years. The 1976-77 version had no mention of the new numbers, but the 1978-79 and 1980-81 versions showed new numbers with the old for highways that were renumbered (and continued to show old numbers on non-paved roads). NDOT made a single-year edition of the map in 1982, which shows only the new numbers. This leads me to believe that the resigning was completed some time in 1982.
From the passing of Nevada's state highway law in 1917 up until the renumbering in the mid 1970s, Nevada's state routes were defined in state law. Once the renumbering came along, virtually all references to specific routes were removed from the Nevada Revised Statutes. This, in essence, removed all pre-1976 numbers from the system (except 28, 88 and 140). (A "Route 94" remains the sole route number prescribed in the NRS, which follows a route from near Pahrump through to SR 159 in the Red Rock area west of Las Vegas. This appears to have been inexplicably added in 1989, and I've never seen any trace of it on maps or in the field.)
I've been told that many dirt roads that had been assigned a route number under state law were actually county roads not maintained by the state. Hence, virtually all state route numbers were removed during the renumbering. This doesn't necessarily jive with the fact that the law was written in a way that the department of highways was supposed to maintain the routes as prescribed in the law. However, it does seem consistent with the fact that most of the paved rural routes got a new three-digit number in the renumbering process, with the majority still on the state highway system today. I haven't been able to research the pre-1976 state highway laws in depth to get a clearer answer on this...I seem to remember there being some pre-1976 road catalog information available at the UNR library, but it wasn't particularly clear and I didn't have time to research in depth.
Old SR 34 is currently maintained by Washoe County as a county route. Old SR 447 north of Gerlach is also maintained as CR 447--Typical county pentagon shields with begin/end banners are at the state highway terminus in Gerlach (probably erected by NDOT, as they appear directly below the SR 447 end/begin shields), but state shield signage persists along the county maintained portion north of Gerlach (as evidenced in the photos above). Not sure about old SR 8A though.
