October 7, 2008: End of freeway segment in Butler County, Kansas, east of Wichita. My best guess for the empty space beside the US 400 shield is the previous state route number.
US 400 is a Frankenstein’s monster of a route, It was created in a government laboratory in the 1990s with its siblings US 412 and US 425, against all conventions of both US route numbering and basic logic. No other three-digit route ends in double zero, as it would be implied to be a child of US 00, which doesn’t exist. This photo is at the east end of a loooong duplex with US 54; US 400 spends a lot of time piggybacking on other roads for no particular reason except a vague idea that maybe sometime in the next century there might be a four-lane road along that route.
As to #54, which is what this post is about, it is a diagonal US route that used to run from El Paso to Chicago but now comes to a meager end at I-72 less than 50 miles into Illinois. There’s no reason that US 54 couldn’t have been added on I-72 to resume the route still signed as IL 54.