Tuesday, July 12, 2016

Does anyone know why some road was reddish in the 60s, instead of grey?


I grew up in Michigan in a tiny town where there was a mile or so of the reddish purple stuff, and the rest was the normal grayish blueish asphalt we see everywhere

10 comments:

  1. It's all due to the color of the crushed rock ingredient of the the asphalt, which becomes visible over time, as some of the heavy oil (asphalt) fades away.

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  2. I have seen these red roads in Pennsylvania and Maryland but I have no idea why they were red.

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  3. That's easy -The asphalt had a red tint added in order to help hide all the blood stains.

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    1. Ha! Well, with all the drunk drivers getting into wrecks, and all the road kill that have met their end on that red road, I can see why they wanted to hide the blood stains

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  4. My guess is that it doesn't have any thing to do with the selection of local source aggregate, as most of my fellow idiots on google have suggested. I believe it is an intentional final course surface treatment applied for the purpose of protecting the base courses from the summer sun. Early asphalt binders would return to a near liquid state in the hottest of summers and would slowly percolate down to the bottom of the mat leaving the surface aggregate with nothing to keep it together, ending up with a 1/2" deep gravel road that is chewing up the rest of the pavement as fast as it can. Why the red tint in Michigan? -no clue

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  5. The red is from the local aggregate. ITs still around today. Here in Kentucky we have mostly limestone and in Indiana it's granite, both are grey. Other parts of the US have this reddish rock. I have also seen a tan colored asphalt down in Louisiana.

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    1. tan? Wow, heven't seen or heard of that until now, thanks!

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  6. High iron (ferric oxide) content in the ground up rocks or clay. We have some roads like that in Kansas and Oklahoma.

    http://www.answers.com/Q/Why_is_the_asphalt_red_on_some_roads_in_Wyoming

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    1. thanks! Have you seen any newer roads like this, or, as I've suggested, they are all 40-60 years old roads?

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    2. We have some red tinted roads here in Wisconsin. Don't know how old they are, but pretty sure they aren't 40-60 years. Roads just don't last that long here.
      Traveling the country as a military brat in the 60's and 70's, I remember seeing a lot of red tinted roads. Depended on the local, I always thought it was from red colored rock used to build them.

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