How tall are these columns?

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From streetlighting to radio, dance through the night whilst the streetlights are glowing outside.

They are 8m columns and will weigh around a tonne.

When driving through Southampton the other week at night I noticed that the city council is getting evermore slack when it comes to street lighting maintenance. Aside from lots of outages, both individual columns and whole streets, they are also stepping up the mixing and matching of light sources. Winchester Road in the city is lit by ZX3s on older columns. Many years ago the council fitted CDM-TT lamps in place of the original SON lamps, upgrading to white light, and until recently it has been all CDO-TT. Recent lamp replacements have seen SON make a comeback though, and in a big way. I would say about half of the columns are now running SON. Look along the street and there isn't a bit which has a decent string of one lamp type, it's all yellow and white mixed together.

Slack sums up Southampton City Council well. Southampton build their roads to last...

... a week, maybe two! It goes for other things too. Councils tend to blame potholes on cold weather, but the fact of the matter is that roads in good condition survive winter intact whilst the already neglected, patched and potholed roads get worse. Southampton is no exception. The city's roads have been cluster bombed for decades, and even with increased spending on resurfacing the deterioration seems to be spiralling out of control. Lots and lots of potholes, everywhere you go, from strategic A roads down to residential streets and lots of rutting. In some places you can play the game of "spot the tarmac wearing course", because there is more foundation layers of tarmac exposed on certain sections of road than the top layer. And we've probably all seen it, new road surfaces struggle to last even five years nowadays without being patched to buggery. Southampton can beat that, there is a section of new road surface that was laid only last year that is now completely shot. How bad does a road surface have to have been laid for it to not even last a year? And then there's all the other maintenance issues of Southampton roads, but there are too many issues to list here. There's also the case of a sewer that collapsed in about 2003 closing a road for 3 months, and the road at this location appears to be sinking quite a lot, which suggests the rebuild may have been of questionable quality.

What I will say is, bring on the South Coast Street Lighting PFI. Southampton's street lighting is being so badly mismanaged at the moment along with other aspects of the city's public services that it deserves a respite, and fast.

I wonder if the forthcoming PFI and the price differential between SON and CDO-TT is what is causing cheaper SON lamps to be refitted again?

Southampton have mistakingly fitted SON lamps in metal halide illuminated streets for a good few years now, although this has been on the scale of perhaps three or four per road, still outnumbered by metal halide. Winchester Road is an extreme example. It probably has elements of both cost cutting and carelessness to it.

Something else I remembered, there are a few columns up on the Chilworth Gyratory that haven't worked for years. When I say years, I mean they haven't worked as long as I have had a driving license (5 years), and have probably not been working for a couple of years prior to that time. About this time of year back in 2007 the columns had their original Z9555 'bricks' replaced with ZX3s, but the outages still weren't fixed. However, now that the new lanterns on the old columns are three years old, the outages have now been fixed, and the lanterns have powered up for the first time, three years late! I suppose it proves that Southampton can fix defects occasionally.

Meanwhile, some of you may remember me telling you of the imminent death of Z9450s in about September or October 2008. I'm glad to say, the last Z9450 is still there, still in perfect condition and still doing nightly service, sat on top of its seemingly structurally good concrete column with no visible signs of defects. Exactly, why replace what appears to be a sound column with a sound lantern? At the rate things are going, the Z9450 will not be replaced with the ZX2 on the new column, it will be replaced with whatever lanterns the PFI installs on new columns. I expect there will be three columns side by side, with the service transferred from the oldest to newest, skipping the intermediate! Goes to show, Southampton has the cash to spend. It's not as if their road network isn't one of the worst in the developed world and would give third world roads a run for their money.

Or that the outage has actually been reported and Southern Electric have fixed the fault. During the 1990s SE would routinely take a year or so to fix cable faults or transfer the supply to casual replacement columns. They have got better but the Portsmouth PFI has witnessed work orders to SE still taking several months. Some columns on the A27 at Fareham took more than 5 years to be connected after they were installed in the late 1980s.

Yesterday I noticed that the Tamlite Tamcourts in Southampton, installed in about 2002/3, have all been replaced. The columns have been fitted with new brackets and XGS103s.

EDIT: meanwhile, Atlas/Thorn Gamma 8s have now become extinct in Southampton.

Well finally some progress on the Havant bypass on the A27 and for once the HA have actually used smaller columns than the originals instead of the trend for even larger columns. The new columns are aluminium "crash safe" ones, 8m tall and fitted with flat glass Sapphire 2 lanterns.



The difference between the old and new is quite clear...



It may be with a nearby nature reserve, the column height has been chosen to be below the trees. Well if 8m is good enough here, let’s have more of it. The main carriageway has 10m columns but these have yet to have the brackets and lanterns installed. The columns are group switched - part night anyone?  

Quite a sight to see, new 8m columns on a trunk road dual carriageway slip road. Let's just hope they're not any brighter than 150w. 100w would be sufficient at that height.

Strange goings on in Southampton (of course).

A couple of years ago a new lighting column was placed on a footpath on the southern side of the footpath but not connected up. A few months later the column mysteriously migrated to the northern side of the footpath, but was never connected up. Today, the column has migrated back to the southern side of the footpath.

Is that it now, or is it doing to move over the other side of the footpath and back again a few more times?