A £515m motorway which stretches 598 miles from the top of Germany to the bottom is one of Europe’s longest roads.
Bundesautobahn 7 winds from Flensburg on the border with Denmark all the way to the Fussen border tunnel with Austria, travelling through major German cities such as Hamburg, Hannover and Kiel.
It takes between five and six hours to travel the entire length of the road which travels through a range of terrain from city centres to mountain ranges.
The road’s most congested area is its route through the centre of Hamburg which sees an immense volume of traffic, especially during school holidays.
Travellers can reach almost every part of Germany by travelling along the road and then pulling off.
The autobahn replaced a number of standard roads which had been in place since medieval times, with plans first being submitted as far back as 1926.
By 1937, the first section had opened from Gottingen to Bad Hersfeld and in the same year, construction began in the section between Bad Hersfeld and Würzburg with a number of bridges being built.
However, the next section was not complete before the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939, which led to the project being put on hold before being abandoned in 1940.
Following the war, the route was altered leaving some of the abandoned bridge structures of Strecke 46 to be preserved as historic monuments.
During the 1950s the road was extended from the south of Hamburg to Gottingen, with seven sections opening to traffic before 1960.
But despite early progress, the road was not fully complete until 2009 with the final gap through the Reinertshoftunnel to the edge of the foot of the Alps being completed, from there the road becomes one lane and flows into the border tunnel Fussen to Austria.
