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Fifty years later, when the first motor cars started to chug along American dirt tracks, the Washington wise guys’ attention turned to creating a hard-surfaced road right across the United States. At that time, the main coast-to-coast road was the ramshackle Lincoln Highway, which followed a northerly route from New York to San Francisco, but few people made the trip and even fewer could afford a car. In 1912 the federal government started building a road from Washington, DC to St Louis along the Cumberland Road, an old wagon trail. From St Louis, it was extended along a path following the old Santa Fe Trail to Albuquerque in New Mexico before veering southwards to Flagstaff in Arizona. Called the Grand Canyon Route, the road then passed through Ashfork and Seligman to Topock on the Colorado River, where cars were loaded on to railway trucks and transported to Needles in California. The last section of road ran through the Mojave Desert to San Bernardino before heading due south to San Diego.

Except for a few minor diversions, all of that route from St Louis to San Bernardino followed what would later become part of Route 66. Then in 1914, Henry Ford, that genius of mass-manufacture, applied the methods he’d seen in the Colt Revolver factory to making cars. Within a decade of Henry Ford inventing his Model-T, the number of registered vehicles on American roads had leapt from 180,000 to more than 17 million, and motoring had become a means of transportation for the masses. For American families and businesses, the automobile promised unprecedented freedom and mobility. By the early 1920s, they were demanding a reliable road network on which to drive their newly acquired vehicles. In response, the federal government pledged to link small-town USA with all of the metropolitan capitals.

At last Route 66’s hour had come. In the summer of 1926 the first interstate highway connecting Chicago to the West Coast was finally authorised. Officially designated Route 66, it ran from Chicago to Los Angeles, linking the isolated, rural West to the densely populated, urban Midwest and Northeast. Chicago had long served as a central meeting and distribution point for goods and people moving to the West, so it made sense for it to be the starting point. A large part of the new highway followed the old Santa Fe Trail and Grand Canyon Route. Cobbled together from existing roads and designed to connect the Main Streets of remote local communities, much of it was in poor condition. Speeds above 20 m.p.h. were rarely possible in Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico and Arizona, where the road was often little more than a dirt track cleared of the largest boulders. Nevertheless, by running south to avoid the high passes of the Rocky Mountains, Route 66 was the first road from the Midwest to the Pacific that was passable all year round.

By 1929, the whole of the Illinois and Kansas sections, two-thirds of the Missouri section and a quarter of the road in Oklahoma had been paved. Even bikers like me would have been happy with that. But across all of Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and non-metropolitan California only sixty-four miles had been surfaced. Nevertheless, businesses in the numerous small towns along the route prospered as local entrepreneurs built service stations, restaurants, motels, campgrounds and entertainment attractions.

When the Great Depression gripped America in the early 1930s, more than 200,000 people escaped from the dust bowl states of Kansas and Oklahoma. Strapping their belongings on to their flatbed trucks, they set off along Route 66 with dreams of a better life in the promised land of California. President Roosevelt’s New Deal programme increasingly eased their way, as thousands of unemployed men were set to work on the road as part of a nationwide investment in public works. By 1938, all of the Mother Road was surfaced with concrete or tarmac, making it America’s first transcontinental paved route.

The highway experienced its heyday over the next two decades. As soon as America entered the