 The finished road , while an improvement over the previous route , still was not much more than a track , and remained such throughout the 1940s and 1950s . Efforts to seal the highway began in Norseman in 1960 , with the Western Australian section completed in 1969 and the South Australian section finished in 1976 . Further improvement works have been undertaken since the 1980s , including widening and reconstructing portions of the road . 
