Derby's Street Lighting PFI Contract

Shardlow Road, Alvaston (Part Two)

The following photographs were taken on Sunday, 21st November 2010.

The Bembridge Drive / Keldholme Lane roundabout was home to several  GEC Z9554M 135 Watt SOX lanterns. Four single-arm bracketed columns lit the roundabout itself, and four double-arm columns lit the entrances/exits. A collapsed Truesigns traffic bollard can be seen on the bottom-left of this picture.

An integrally-geared Philips MA 50 was installed further along the road.

The column's inspection door was missing at the time of photographing; this revealed that the column served as a control point for another piece of apparatus. The MA 50 may have been fitted when the isolation equipment was installed - the remote gear for a Z9554M would have to be removed from the column base in order to accommodate the new enclosures. The 'T' prefix to the column's identification number stands for 'Trunk' - Shardlow Road used to be part of the A6, which was a trunk road and was maintained by the Highways Agency instead of the Local Authority. The reason that these columns are now being replaced is that the maintenance of many trunk roads was eventually passed over to Local Authority control, in a process known as "de-trunking".

A very short former illuminated signpost still stood nearby. The post looked to have been cut down to this height, and then capped off for safety. I couldn't help thinking that the post looked rather forlorn in amongst the ivy and fallen autumn leaves!

An Urbis ZX3 provided illumination over a pedestrian crossing. This lantern would have been fitted during the trunk road days - the ZX3 is not a lantern that Derby City Council has ever fitted (the ZX3s on the A5111 Ring Road were installed by another contractor).

Immediately after the crossing, a Thorn Alpha 8 could be seen. This was a lantern that Derby City Council used, and it perhaps replaced a defective ZX3 after de-trunking had occurred.

The following column saw a return to Z9554Ms.

A reasonably common problem with Z9554Ms is that the rear section of the bowl can break away after many years' service. The next lantern had encountered this problem.

This Z9554M was fitted with a Royce Thompson P42 thermal two-part cell.

A rather new-looking remotely-geared MA 50 was next.

This was then followed by another integrally-geared example.

A PFI-specification column and SGS 254 lantern seen further along the road replaced an accident-damaged 10 m column (also supporting an integrally-geared MA 50, as it happens) at some point between 2008 and the date of photographing...that narrows it down, then!

RETURN TO PART ONE | CONTINUE TO PART THREE

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