46H. Station Road, Broadclyst Station, Exeter, Devon With thanks to Louis Cunningham for informing me of this Survivor. Attached to a wooden pole, which also doubles as a support for a high voltage to low voltage electricity supply transformer, is a GEC Z8691, running an 80 or 125 Watt MBF (mercury vapour) lamp. The lantern may have survived replacement because of the proximity to the transformer creating a possible safety risk, though when pictured in June 2024, the surrounding lanterns were still WRTL Arcs and Urbis ZX1s, running high pressure sodium (SON) lamps, rather than any LED equivalents.
When pictured, the lantern was operating in daylight, as was a ZX1 further down the road - clearly, these lights were group controlled (probably using the fifth-core method, judging by the setup of the adjacent overhead low voltage cabling), and whatever means of providing the group switching was faulty.
Although the daytime brightness and camera white balance have exaggerated the greenness of the mercury lamp, it still looked quite dim, and had probably been running constantly for a while.
The Z8691 is the gear-in-head version of the Z8896, and the two bolts used to secure the ballast to the inside of the gear tray flap are visible.
Surprisingly, as I was preparing to leave, I noticed that the lamp had extinguished, though the ZX1 was still lit. There must have been a slight blip in the lighting supply - most modern SON lamps are able to re-strike quite quickly in the event of this occurring, though mercury lamps have a longer re-strike time, as the arc voltage is initially too high to re-strike the lamp successfully.
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