Ontario Highway 98B History - The King's Highways of Ontario

King's Highway 98B was a short King's Highway which connected Highway 98 to Highway 2 in Tilbury. The route was created in 1941, when Highway 98 was extended east from Tilbury to Blenheim along Middle Road. As a result of this new Highway 98 extension to Blenheim, a 1 mile section of the original route of Highway 98 which ran along Queen Street through Downtown Tilbury was bypassed. The Tilbury route appears in Department of Highways of Ontario (DHO) Mileage Tables throughout the 1960s as Highway 98B, although it is not clear at this time if the highway through Tilbury had been known by that route number since its inception in 1941. Some DHO documents from the 1960s indicate that Queen Street was also assigned a 7000-series highway number (Highway 7093), which means that it is entirely possible that the highway via Queen Street did not have a posted route number for at least a portion of its existence. The section of Highway 98B from South Street (today's Stewart Street) southerly to the Highway 98 Junction was under provincial jurisdiction, while the section of the highway from the Highway 2 Junction southerly to South Street was a non-assumed section of the highway under municipal jurisdiction. The non-assumed section of Highway 98B through Downtown Tilbury was designated as a Municipal Connecting Link by an Order-in-Council, effective May 24, 1962.

When Highway 98 was decommissioned as a King's Highway through Kent County in 1970, the route of Highway 98B was decommissioned as well. The provincially-owned section of Highway 98B was transferred to the Town of Tilbury, effective May 21, 1970. The Municipal Connecting Link status of the remainder of the route was subsequently revoked. Since 1970, Former Highway 98B has been known merely as Queen Street.