Those who welcomed the work back in those days could scarcely have imagined what it would lead to, in terms of controversy and heartache from the number of fatal accidents.
Those who remember Melbourn Bridge can well imagine the fatalities which would have occurred there in these days of massively-increased and faster cars... or would they?
The road did a very tight Z bend under the old railway bridge, with a turning to Withersfield straight after.
It was clearly an extremely dangerous piece of road and would certainly have slowed drivers down.
The winding bits of the main road leading up to it, now converted into pothole-filled laybys, made overtaking as difficult as it still is on much of the irritating A143 to Bury, where there are far fewer accidents – although one hopes this week's tragedy does not show that this, too, is becoming more dangerous.
The road then meandered on over the hill to Horseheath (again, you can still see the course of it in the laybys) and went into the village, and so on, down into Linton with its narrow streets and sharp bends, particularly at the top of the hill opposite where the Green Hill pub used to be, and where there is now a rather annoying traffic light-controlled pedestrian crossing (although, to the best of my knowledge, no-one has ever died in an accident there).
The removal of Melbourn Bridge was followed by improvements from there to Horseheath, the Linton bypass (which isn't quite a bypass), the dualling either side of Bartlow crossroads (or Dean Road crossroads as the signs now call it), and finally the Horseheath bypass.
All this was done at great expense by Cambridgeshire County Council, and those of us who saw our journey time to Cambridge reduced, naturally rejoiced.
Of course, the council didn't do it for us – why would they? Haverhill is not in Cambridgeshire and doesn't elect any of them.
They did it for the benefit of the residents in the villages along the road, who were fed up with the increasing traffic thundering through, particularly lorries on their way to the east coast ports.
But there was a problem. The wonderful fast road stopped at the Suffolk border. There was only two or three miles in Suffolk before it went into Essex, and Essex County Council were not willing to upgrade their bit.
Instead, to protect their villages in a different way, and at some cost, they wanted to divert lorries via the M11 and improved A120, which is what the signposts still do, and which was underlined by making the western half of the road the A1307 and the eastern half a series of unmemorable numbers, supposedly going to Braintree rather than Colchester. End of further improvements to any of it.
Curiously, throughout all this, no-one ever imagined that Haverhill would become a destination in itself, or that it would be a creator of dangerous volumes of traffic heading the other way – towards Cambridge.
Eventually, thanks to developers' money, we had the Haverhill bypass, which is as much a distributor road to the industrial areas as a relief of through traffic.
The point of this rather long history lesson, as with so many others in which Haverhill figures prominently, is that there has been no overall plan to any of this – just a lot of expensive, contradictory and ad hoc solutions to various different problems, none of which were those of Haverhill residents.
Huge amounts of money were spent on protecting, in one way or another, the quality of life in the villages around, but very little on Haverhill.
So it is not difficult to point the finger at the villain of the piece, which has kept its hand firmly in its pocket for the last 40 years – Suffolk County Council. Perhaps it's time it paid up.
Is Haverhill Suffolk's responsibility, or isn't it?