Highways, roads two-thirds financed by the State government through the Country Roads Board (later VicRoads). The North-Western Highway was declared a State Highway on 1 July 1925, cobbled from a collection of roads from Melbourne through Kyneton, Castlemaine, Bendigo, Sea Lake and Ouyen to Mildura (for a total of 324 miles); before this declaration, the road between Melbourne and Bendigo was referred to as (Main) Bendigo Road or Melbourne-Bendigo Road. The North-Western Highway was renamed the Calder Highway in 1928, after William Calder, chairman of the Country Roads Board from 1913-28. In the 1959/60 financial year, another section from Elphinstone to Harcourt was added as a deviation bypassing Castlemaine, along the former Elphinstone-Harcourt Road (already having been declared a Main Road by the Country Roads Board in 1937/38 financial year); the previous alignments of the Calder Highway from Elphinstone to Castlemaine, and Castlemaine to Harcourt, were subsumed into the Pyrenees Highway and Midland Highway respectively. The Calder Alternative Highway was declared in June 1983, along the former Ravenswood-Marong Road. The Calder Highway was later signed National Route 79 in 1955; when the Midland Highway was allocated State Route 149 in 1986, it shared a concurrency along the Calder Highway between Harcourt and Bendigo. With Victoria's conversion to the newer alphanumeric system in the late 1990s this was altered to an A79 designation for the highway portion, and a M79 designation for the freeway portion into Melbourne (and the concurrency with Midland Highway was replaced with route A300); the New South Wales section was left unallocated when they switched to the alphanumeric system in 2013. Calder Alternative Highway was signed Alternative National Route 79 between Ravenswood and Marong, and was later replaced by route A790. Originally, the Calder Highway ran through northwestern Melbourne as an undivided highway, ultimately through Niddrie as Keilor Road and terminating in Essendon; traffic continued south along Mount Alexander Road to reach central Melbourne. Keilor Road - already heavily congested and supporting a tram line - was eventually bypassed by a freeway-standard road in 1972 to terminate at a junction with Lancefield Road (later upgraded to the Tullamarine Freeway), rejoining the Calder Highway at the western end of Niddrie; the freeway-standard was extended further west to East Keilor (the future location of the Western Ring Road interchange) in 1975, and to Keilor by the early 1980s. However, it was not until the 1990s that work began to