This thread covers the Midlands but also more central parts of England such as Birmingham and Nottingham but includes Skegness and Boston.

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

Looks like Coventry has moved on from Philips now for side road!
And have gone back to Urbis (black Sapphires running m/h not son!)
Main road is still dominated by Philips and their cooking bowls!

Two of the best cities in the Midlands for lighting have PFIs this year which is a bit of a shame, Nottingham and Birmingham. Nottingham still has mercury Atlas Alpha 3s on some roads and has a few old GEC mercury lanterns on the side roads mainly Z8591s. Still quite a lot of these mounted on concrete Stanton columns and a lot of cast-iron columns with swan necks around the city centre (some unfortunate examples have been retrofitted with SGS203s. They look awful!   ).

I don't know Birmingham as well but there are still a lot of old mercury lanterns there from what I've seen and interestingly they seem to have casually replaced mercury for mercury in a lot of places, very unusual these days! The older mercury lanterns are Revo, either those brilliant Hatfield lanterns with the huge 'hat' canopies or Diadems. The newer mercury lanterns (usually mounted on newer repro versions of the old Revo columns) are AC Ford AC850s. Although I've never seen them myself some of the main roads apparently have SOX GEC Turtles on them as well, not sure how effective they'd be at lighting the road!   All in all, a lot of interesting stuff is sadly going to come down.

I wonder what lanterns the PFIs will use. Nottingham usually use Philips lanterns but that doesn't mean the PFI contractor will. Not sure who Birmingham favour. Will certainly be interesting to see what goes on and sad to see the end of more mercury lighting especially as it's survived so long in two of our biggest cities  

I think poor claire will be busy trying to save quite a bit of birmingham's history! Its a shame i dont drive as i would be making quite a few trips to save some good stuff from birmingham!  

Yeah, I don't really have the room to collect lanterns but I could make an exception for one of those Hatfields! I mean, that really would be a piece of history to preserve!  

Yeah, I'd want at least one of those Hatfields, if they were available! Even if it meant travelling for a couple of hours and changing trains to get to Nottingham (or beeston at least). And if a 90w SOX Turtle was up for grabs, I'd be interested too!

Sad times for the streets, good times for the collections!

_________________

Nottingham has a fair few Alpha 1's.......hint hint.......

You'll have to change trains again at Nottingham as you need to go to Birmingham to see the Hatfields. I've never seen them in Nottingham. I saw some in Dudley on side roads off the A4123/A461 (Burnt Tree) junction years ago but I doubt they're still there as vast swathes of mercury have been wiped out in Dudley over the last few years.

Well, what I was meaning about nottingham is if, for example, I was buying one off somebody and it meant I had to go that way. But from York, the trains to brummie are direct, and take a couple hours.
if I ever went, I'd want to know in advance what areas/streets had the hadfields in so I wasn't wandering about and being lost!

_________________

Carrying on coventry's mercury

http://maps.google.co.uk/maps?f=q&sourc ... 13797&z=16

http://maps.google.co.uk/maps?f=q&sourc ... 13797&z=16

http://maps.google.co.uk/maps?f=q&sourc ... 13797&z=16