was completed. By September 1946, both Tanner and Fisher had made substantial progress on their respective sections, with all excavation on the Tanner section completed, with preliminary paving work beginning. Both sections, however, were disconnected by the Santa Fe Railway which cut the new highway in half. At the time, planning for a railroad overpass was being undertaken by the State Highway Department. The H.L. Royden Company was awarded the contract for constructing the overpass. The new highway was opened to traffic in October 1947 and US 66 was re-routed onto it, bypassing the hamlet of Townsend between Flagstaff and Winona. The overall cost of the project ended up being $1,433,400 (equivalent to $ in ). Although the route between Townsend and Winona was removed from the state highway system, the section from Flagstaff to Townsend remained part of US 89, which shared a wrong-way concurrency with US 66 from Townsend to Ash Fork. Following the re-routing, the concurrency was shortened to an intersection between the old and new route in eastern Flagstaff. In 1950, the State Highway Department began planning construction of a new alignment of US 66 through Yucca. Construction was planned to start near Topock and head northeast through Yucca to connect with the existing highway near Kingman. At the time, the section between Topock and Kingman still followed the steep and winding path through Oatman into the Black Mountains and through Sitgreaves Pass. This section was built across this rough terrain instead of following the more level route to the east adopted by the railroad because the road followed the National Old Trails highway which was for gold mining in Oatman and Goldroad (now a ghost town). It was fraught with hairpin turns and was the steepest along the entire route, so much so that some early travelers, too frightened at the prospect of driving such a potentially dangerous road, hired locals to navigate the winding grade. By September 1950, the Oatman bypass was given priority on the state highway construction agenda, as US 66 was crucial to military defense traffic. The State Highway Department contracted the Phoenix-Tempe Stone Company to construct the first of the new route on September 15, 1950, at a cost of $262,152 (equivalent to $ in ). By early 1951, the bypass was under construction. Phoenix-Tempe was awarded a second contract on February 1, 1951, to build an overpass over the