With the weekend here, I was able to take a look at the LED lanterns currently being installed in Colchester as part of
Essex County Council's LED trial in daylight for the first time. Unless stated, all photographs were taken yesterday (7th March 2015). And ECC's chosen lantern in Colchester is...
The
Urbis Schréder Ampera Midi. This Urbis Ampera is on Colchester's North Bridge.
How the Urbis Ampera looks on one of Colchester's Stewarts & Lloyds columns. The new LED lanterns are being retrofitted to existing columns.
A day-burning Urbis Ampera in East Street.
It is still an enormous surprise to see LED street lighting here in Essex, especially considering Essex County Council's refusal in the past to embrace even SON on a wide scale, let alone embrace the white light sources like metal halide and fluorescent that came after SON (this is not a criticism - I'd rather have most of the county lit with 35W SOX than 70W SON if it was a choice between the two. SOX is also cheaper on the electricity bill of course). I imagine the small number of posts in this topic compared to the other regional discussion threads on UKASTLE could be testament to how little things change around here.
The majority - possibly the vast majority - of Essex's street lighting is still SOX. With the part-night lighting controversy split along party lines and no County Council elections until 2017, there's a racing certainly that SOX will be sticking around for some time to come. In fact,
it's already been reported that this LED trial will not change Essex County Council's controversial part-night lighting policy.Initial thoughts on the new LED lighting is that it is a vast improvement to the previously-installed sodium lighting and will certainly benefit the town's CCTV operators. To the human eye, the colour temperature of the new lanterns appears to be neither warm white (yellow hue) or cool white (blue hue) but pretty much the pure white light in the middle of the two.
North Station Road in Colchester photographed in December 2014.
How North Station Road looks now.
The picturesque and often-photographed view of Colchester's North Hill, as seen in December 2014.
How North Hill looks now.
North Hill was converted to LED in the early hours of Saturday 7th March. When I returned from work on Friday night, the road was bathed in yellow light, and when I got up in the early hours of yesterday morning to get these "after" photos, the road was illuminated in white light.
Another view of North Station Road from December 2014.
And the same view now.
If you want to see what this view looks like in the daytime, check out Claire's picture here. The view hasn't changed in 34 years!
The Essex County Council LED trial only affects street lighting that stays on all night - i.e. the town centre, some radial routes and junctions that remain lit. All street lighting that is currently turned off at midnight is unaffected.
Firstly, a look at Colchester town centre. The town still retains a number of Stewart & Lloyds columns, although the open GLS lanterns they first supported are long gone. Here, these Philips SGS203s (quite modern by Colchester standards) have been fitted with Telensa telecells.
The assorted GEC and Thorn turtles, GEC Z8600s, WRTL Arcs and SGS203s in Head Street have now been changed to Urbis Amperas.
The Alpha Three on this (quite possibly the most puzzling) column in the town centre also got a telecell.
A new column appeared alongside the quirky column with a SON-running Phosco P567. This photograph was taken in December 2014. Although I will always view the Phosco P567 as a side-road lantern, they have started to appear on main roads around Colchester at mounting heights up to 10 metres.
The Phosco P567 didn't last long.
Now a look at the roads leading to the town centre.
Most of the roads leading to the town centre were originally designed to be switched off at midnight, but after an outcry at how aggressively ECC's exception criteria was being applied,
councillors won a number of concessions and many roads in close proximity of the town centre now remain lit. Sadly, these roads contain a lot of vintage SOX that is about to bite the dust.
Military Road in Colchester. Originally scheduled to be switched off at midnight, this road won a reprieve, so consequently it is currently being converted to LED. Philips MA90s, ELECO GR100s and GEC Z9454s were lost from this road.
Many Alpha Ones will also be lost in the LED trial. The Atlas Alpha One was launched in 1955 and the Urbis Ampera was launched 56 years later in 2011, so it's quite a juxtaposition to see lanterns from such different eras sharing the same street.
Colchester's Alpha Ones have certainly aged well and still look as good as they did in their 1970s heyday. I'm unlikely to be around in 56 years time to see if the Urbis Ampera equals the Alpha One's production longevity and long service life.
For some reason, none of the sleeved concrete columns around the town have had their lanterns swapped to LED, so this pair of Alpha Ones on Wimpole Road have a stay of execution for the time being.
This may just be the crews getting the easy columns done first before returning to the more awkward columns at a later date, or perhaps there is a plan to remove the old concretes as soon as the budget allows, and the lanterns can remain until the new columns arrive.
I fear this poor old Alpha One won't be around for much longer either.
The electrical tape eventually lost its battle with gravity, the droop angle worsened and the Opticell eventually disappeared. The Alpha One shoe is still here in 2015, and now the two lanterns on the columns immediately behind this one indicate that the council won't be sourcing a spare Opticell to get this Alpha One back in to light.
Again there appears to be circumstantial evidence in this photograph to suggest that sleeved concretes are being put to the back of the queue when it comes to LED conversion. In the background are two ELECO GR100s and a shallow-bowled Davis GR100.
Magdalen Street was also reprieved from part-night lighting, and has consequently had its eclectic mix of Philips MA90s, ELECO GR100s and GEC Z9454s replaced with Urbis Amperas. Having said that, the crews evidently didn't want to tackle the top-entry lanterns.
The nearest top-entry lantern in this photo is the ELECO with the W-shaped bowl that has often appeared on UKASTLE in the past, and
the top-entry lantern in the far distance is this GEC Z9455 with the smashed bowl, which is still hanging on with its smashed and taped bowl.Sadly, the days of the ELECO with the W-shaped bowl, and many of the town's other top-entry ELECO, GEC and Phosco lanterns are numbered. The crews will eventually take a disc cutter to the bracket finials and side-entry fit the new Urbis Amperas.
But their imminent destruction shouldn't stop us from enjoying a night-time photo of this ELECO with the W-shaped bowl. This photo is from December 2014.
In conclusion, the crews involved in implementing Essex County Council's LED trial have made swift progress in converting many of the roads in and around the town centre to the Urbis Amperas, with about ten roads completed or at near completion (North Station Road, North Hill, Head Street, St. John's Street, Osborne Street, Military Road, Magdalen Street, Wimpole Road, Brook Street and East Hill).
Having said that, roads which have sleeved concretes and/or top entry lanterns will need to be visited again to complete the work. Furthermore, neither of the 40mph dual carriageways that remain lit after midnight (Southway and Balkerne Hill, both with 10m and 12m columns) have been tacked yet, none of the lanterns on wall-mounted lighting control boxes in the town centre have been converted, and many lanterns at difficult road junctions have also been missed off for the time being.
But the biggest surprise of all is that Essex County Council are doing something like this in the first place.