Two of the best cities in the Midlands for lighting have PFIs this year which is a bit of a shame, Nottingham and Birmingham. Nottingham still has mercury Atlas Alpha 3s on some roads and has a few old GEC mercury lanterns on the side roads mainly Z8591s. Still quite a lot of these mounted on concrete Stanton columns and a lot of cast-iron columns with swan necks around the city centre (some unfortunate examples have been retrofitted with SGS203s. They look awful!
![Rolling Eyes :roll:](./images/smilies/icon_rolleyes.gif)
).
I don't know Birmingham as well but there are still a lot of old mercury lanterns there from what I've seen and interestingly they seem to have casually replaced mercury for mercury in a lot of places,
very unusual these days! The older mercury lanterns are Revo, either those brilliant Hatfield lanterns with the huge 'hat' canopies or Diadems. The newer mercury lanterns (usually mounted on newer repro versions of the old Revo columns) are AC Ford AC850s. Although I've never seen them myself some of the main roads apparently have SOX GEC Turtles on them as well, not sure how effective they'd be at lighting the road!
![Shocked :shock:](./images/smilies/icon_eek.gif)
All in all, a lot of interesting stuff is sadly going to come down.
I wonder what lanterns the PFIs will use. Nottingham usually use Philips lanterns but that doesn't mean the PFI contractor will. Not sure who Birmingham favour. Will certainly be interesting to see what goes on and sad to see the end of more mercury lighting especially as it's survived so long in two of our biggest cities
![Crying or Very Sad :cry:](./images/smilies/icon_cry.gif)