Station Rd Replacements

Work continued on the 24th March. I watched an Alpha 4 and an MA 90 be replaced - the end of the road was now in sight.

The Alpha 4 was right beside the former railway bridge leading to Mickleover Station, from which the road gets its name. Even from the ground, I could tell that this Alpha 4 had been there for a good few years as the canopy was very grubby.

The column was lowered to the ground carefully, as the distance between the HIAB and the hedge was quite narrow.

The lantern was propped up against the hedge whilst the column was cut. It, certainly, had seen better days...

The original NEMA socket was still on the top of the column and was in a much better condition than the one seen on page 8B.

As always, the outreach part of the bracket was cut away from the rest of it.

Due to staffing shortages, bystanders were also required to assist in digging the new hole!

Or, at least, posing alongside it with the long-handled shovel, while others did the actual work!

The 40 mph sign had to be refitted to the new column - this was done while the column was still horizontal for ease. Once this had been successfully fitted, the column was raised and wired up.

There are some Philips MA 90s at the end of the road, which do not use the split concentric (combined Neutral and Earth) supply cable - the reason being that they are on the council's cable as opposed to the Electricity Board's. Instead, the columns are wired in two-core armoured cable.

The first MA 90 was situated right by a drain; however, there was enough space around it for a hole to be successfully dug out. The lantern is controlled on an SS55 two-part cell, and so once the door had been opened, I flicked the test switch and the lantern came on for the last time...

The gear looked reasonably new, as did the SS55 controller (which I later discovered dated from September 2001) but I think that the lantern was older than this.

The cut-outs were much older and were not to be used in the replacement column, so the supply had to be isolated, in order to allow the Council-owned service cables to be removed safely. The isolation point was at a feeder pillar a short distance back up the road, so once the main switch inside the pillar had been switched off, and the fuse carrier removed (for extra safety), work could begin to remove the cables from the cut-outs.

The pillar was installed at about the same time as the MA 50s on page 7. The road had been widened at that time and so the original pillar was removed as it was in the way of the new lane. Many of the original components were transferred across, however. The Alpha 1 that had been next to the original pillar served as the group control point for the remaining lights along Station Road, with the contactor (the object located top-left on the background) feeding the outgoing supply cable.

Once the cables had been removed, the column was lifted and laid flat on the pavement. The inside of the lantern was very dirty as the bowl did not fit properly, for some reason.

The NEMA socket had been completely removed from the top of this column - that is if one was ever fitted in the first place.

Two new glanding plates were fitted to the armoured cable and then a new cutout was positioned onto the backboard. The lantern's cable was wired up to the cut-out after lunch (I left at this point and so I didn't see it happening).

Once work on this column had been completed, the next column along, again supporting an MA 90, was replaced.