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PostPosted: Sun Mar 13, 2016 4:02 pm 
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What a shame!! I think those Bricks managed to survive for as long as they did as they would have only been fitted when the A40 was realigned in 1991.


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PostPosted: Mon Mar 14, 2016 8:51 pm 
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Bricks had already been discontinued after the 80s, I believe Trafficvisions were used on the sections widened in the early 90s (must have been quite new then!).

One place where Bricks might survive a while longer is Heathrow's Southern Perimeter Road, as it is privately run and not shown on GSV. It is plagued with SON casual reps though.

And no one could forget Thorpe Interchange, even though the M3 mainline columns have disappeared.


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PostPosted: Thu Mar 17, 2016 6:35 pm 
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6 weeks ago, I wrote:
Back in the autumn of 2014, in the Surrey PFI thread I wrote:
In Bramley south of Guildford this GEC Z8896 that still runs mercury has lived a precarious existence for the last few years.

The property it is located outside has been having major building works and it could have been side swiped by delivery lorries - in fact the owners had added some coloured safety netting around its base to make it more visible as the GSV image shows. This was latter replaced with orange netting.

It did survive the assault by the lorries and the work finished earlier this year. But a few months back it was excavated with notice on the barriers stating "being replaced as part of the Surrey Streetlighting PFI."

Then this week the barriers have gone, and the hole filled in but the column is still there and was lit this morning.

I suspect it may be owned by the Parish of Bramley and not on Surrey's inventory. There are are however (PFI) Libras on the same road less than half a mile away. So for the time being it lives on.

Also likely to be "parish"  and nearby is this GEC 5670 also running 80W MBF but rather dim.  :(


During my last few weekly trips through Bramley, I thought, but wasn't sure if that column with the Z8896 had gone. Taking a proper look today, it has and I'm not sure what's happened to it. Being parish rather than council owned, the PFI left it alone in the end. Its well set back from the road, but there are a lot of deep tyre ruts in the grass. I wonder if it has succumbed to a collision with vehicles that were parked/manoeuvring on the verge? Or perhaps the parish had it removed given its obsolete lamp type and didn't think it was worth upgrading.

Luckily the '5670 is still there, and still running its worn MBF lamp. If there has been a reduction in parish assets, perhaps this one still survives as its at a junction - not that it casts much light!


Well the column with the GEC Z8896 has indeed been replaced. A new feeder pillar has been fitted and a new 4m black painted column with a black Urbis Evolo has been installed in its place. A 2nd similar column is nearby.

This confirms the lighting is parish owned rather than part of the Surrey PFI.


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PostPosted: Mon Mar 28, 2016 5:04 pm 
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In Hampshire, there is still some interesting lighting to be found which isn't subject to the PFI.

The village of Swanmore north of Wickam in south Hampshire features parish council owned lighting. Unlike many parish councils in Hampshire, Swanmore chose to not opt in to the street lighting PFI, and hence retains its old lighting. There isn't really much that is all that old, but there is a fair amount of mercury in the form of GEC Z8831s.

Image

Image


Some of the latest lantern replacements in the village have been with Libras, some black and some green, as even though the lighting is not part of the PFI the council deal with SSE for maintenance. There has also been a period in recent years where Urbis Sapphire 1s have been installed. Almost all of these run SON-T lamps, but there is one that surprisingly runs an 80W mercury lamp! And here's a daytime picture:

Image


Aside from parish councils, there are also other council departments who have lighting responsibilities. One of these departments is schools. In the post-war construction boom, a number of Hampshire schools were built and featured GEC Z5643s. The vast majority of these have been replaced over the years, including with Phosco P107 mercury lanterns. However, Bursledon County Junior School near Southampton retains a couple of these lovely lanterns. Until recently, they had not been operational for a few years. Thankfully, following an LED lighting upgrade of exterior lighting at the school, these lanterns have been brought back to life with new LED lamps. The refractor rings have been lowered to the bottoms of the lanterns in the process, but nevertheless, relics have been retained against the odds.

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PostPosted: Sun Apr 24, 2016 9:05 pm 
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I have some sad news from Redbridge folks! The last main road with SOX en masse left in the borough (High Road Woodford Green) is about to become all LED! The eclectic mix of GR150s, MAs and Alpha 4s  (as well a stretch of Trafficvisions by some shops and an assortment of SON and MH casual replacements like Sapphires, Iridiums, Urbis Falcos, Furyos and ZXs), all of which has been installed over the course of about 10 years, is being replaced with TRT Aspects, which is becoming the second biggest killer of pretty much everything in the borough, behind the Furyo - ironically, it has even killed a few Furyo casual replacements! The lighting does need tidying up though - some of the columns are extremely rusty and the mish-mash of SOX, SON and MH and all the different lantern models has made the road look a terrible mess! This is making me think that perhaps Redbridge ran out of money to replace the road's lighting with Furyos back in 2014, when other surrounding roads were Furyoed, but now they've found some money and are hitting the big time installing LED instead of MH.

This means that main road SOX lanterns in Redbridge is now down to just a handful. Snakes Lane West is still clinging on to four MA50s, a few MAs are still standing on Woodford Road, despite having had Urbis Frogners installed next to them for at least 2 years, a GEC Z9554 which has been missed through what seems to be a "not my problem" mentality as it's on a council boundary with Waltham Forest and a GEC Z9554 and an MA (around the bend) on Chigwell Road, which are stupidly still in nightly service despite them having Furyos installed next to them for 2 years and the rest of the road having the Furyos working. For some reason I can't fathom lighting replacement has been very sloppy and piecemeal in this part of the borough, and the old lighting that remains is being very poorly maintained!


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PostPosted: Tue Apr 26, 2016 3:58 pm 
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https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@51.62874 ... 312!8i6656


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PostPosted: Wed Apr 27, 2016 6:33 pm 
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Good find Claire.

Meanwhile
Back at the start of Nov 2015, I wrote:
Phosco152 wrote:
As part of the ongoing works in the region by Highways England to convert their lighting stock from SON to LED, in the last week, the A34/A303 interchange in north Hampshire is in the process of having its slip road lighting converted from Urbis ZX3s to what I presume are Lumas (tricky to tell in the dark). As works are in progress, the interchange is a mix of SON and LED lighting at present.


Having now seen the junction in daylight, the LED lanterns - Lumas are actually on new aluminium hockey stick style columns rather than retrofits to the original steel hex section hockey sticks. ZX3s remain on the old columns.


The main works were completed a couple of months back, but one steel column with ZX3 remained. After almost 6 months since work started, this final column has now been replaced and the interchange is now all LED.


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PostPosted: Sat Apr 30, 2016 2:29 pm 
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On the Lighting Gallery website, I saw some photos taken on the A4 Bath Road in west London, showing that the catenary lighting was being replaced with conventional verge-mounted columns and LED lanterns.

I suspect a lot of the catenary lighting may have been replaced by now, if not potentially all, on the A4 and A316. Has anybody driven from Hammersmith down to Heathrow recently? I wonder what, if any, remains?


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PostPosted: Fri Jun 03, 2016 6:07 pm 
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LED conversions march on. Reading in Berkshire, had a fair amount of side road SOX, probably about 50-50 with SON. There have been some LED lanterns in use, a few Stelas and more recently Axias. However in the last few weeks a mass conversion to LED using Holophane V-max lanterns has started.

There are a large proportion of late 1960s S&L columns with curved swannecks and top entry Beta 5s in some parts of the town.

Some had been converted a while back to refractor bowl ZX1s running SON.

They now look like this with V-Maxes.

However columns which still retained the Beta 5s, have had the swanneck and lantern removed and now look like this.

Seems like pulling new cables through the swannecks is too difficult and I assume the columns with ZX1s were rewired when they were fitted. Its not just an isolated example, brackets have been removed on Beta 5 columns but not ZX1 columns.


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PostPosted: Sat Jun 04, 2016 4:03 pm 
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Drove along the A13 for the first time today since the roadworks for the M25 J30 improvements started and can confirm that these ZX3s on the mainline carriageway, which were original to the road's construction and dated from 1998, have been replaced with very tall columns with short brackets and Sapphires installed. I was betting that LED lanterns might be used, but I'm not surprised that Sapphires have been chosen as that seems to be the Highways Agency's preferred lantern in Essex at the moment. The ZX3s on the slip road (on the left in the Streetview link), however, are still standing.

The short stretch of MA60s on the M25 are still soldiering on despite being disconnected several weeks ago.


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