Motorway madness - and a good turn

The trip back from Anglesey turned into a bit of a marathon because of a planned closure on the M56. I knew about it, but had just not anticipated that the planned and carefully-signposted diversion would not be up to the job of absorbing the sheer volume of weekend traffic. So a stretch of road, leading up to the diversion exit, just became gridlocked.
At one point, a couple of traffic police cars zoomed up on the hard shoulder, presumably to try to find a solution. After a while, various impatient drivers behind me began to try the same manoeuvre - pushing their luck, really.  It would only have taken a few minutes for the hard shoulder to become unusable for any emergency vehicles.
At this point, the truck driver in front of me just quietly did the right thing, making best use of his lorry's bulk. He started to straddle the line between the hard shoulder and the inside lane; this stopped any more chancers racing up the hard shoulder, but also made it clear than he was still using the inside lane. This instantly put a stop to any more problems. No one was going to mess with him :-)
Meanwhile I put on one BBC Radio 4 podcast after another, and waited it out. A journey that normally takes around 3 hours took nearly 6.