Highways England is starting a 10 month scheme to replace the street lighting on the A36 through Salisbury from the Bourne Way Roundabout to St Pauls Roundabout, at a cost of £4.5 million over the approx 3.9km length. That's quite a hefty price tag, as that works out at over £57k per 50m length of road, and 10 months is quite extreme for column replacements on one single road. Mind you, there are plans on another bit of Highways England network to replace literally two columns, taking them off DNO supply and introducing a new feeder pillar and cables to serve the two new columns in the process for a grand total of about £63km, so Highways England are brilliant at making cash disappear. Suggestion in the media is that the existing lighting is 44 years old. Whilst that is likely the case some lengths, a greater proportion of the lighting is actually early 1990s, so more like 25 years old.Since the start of lockdown, part of the A36 dual carriageway through Salisbury has been reduced to single carriageway working. However as this section wasn't on the essential route to the weekly supermarket shop, I hadn't ventured that way to have a detailed look. I assumed it was the start of the works.
By June, further works appeared in the next section of the ring road, with new foundations and cable trunking appearing in the verge - confirming my thoughts that the new installations would be verge mounted, replacing the existing central reservation columns.
With lockdown eased, and a work trip to the south west yesterday, it enabled me to travel along the section with the lane restrictions. I was disappointed to find out, that the carriageway works were due to bridge deck waterproofing and not a single new column has yet been installed. The new cabling works are even less advanced along this section.
Meanwhile, the LED replacement scheme (Wilts council funded) continues in Salisbury, with main road columns having their brackets cut back to approx the same length as the Axia 3s. Some have been left - for instance by pedestrian crossings or overbridges, where work would cause too much of an obstruction. I assume these will be dealt with at night when traffic levels are lower.
The LED replacement has yet to hit the north Wiltshire town of Marlborough. However Axia 3s are quite widespread in villages/hamlets along the A roads where they have been used to replace Beta 5s with failed lamps. Again there are a mix of black and grey versions, with black probably more common.
It does seem a somewhat labour intensive way of working to keep coming back to these rural locations to add new lanterns. Given the small number of lanterns in each location, it would probably have been more efficient to swap all the lanterns in 1 go - utilising a crew specifically for that purpose. Or, just not bother to replace them at all until the full replacement works reached that area. It's a similar story in my village, 3 Axias now installed, but to do the whole village would probably only take 2 days.
I wonder if the black/grey mix is due to a shortage of the grey lanterns which predominate in Salisbury. The early stages of the south coast PFI saw a similar issue with black
Libras and
Iridiums initially being installed before being swapped out for green ones.
The LED replacement scheme is more complete in Amesbury, a small town approx 10 miles north of Salisbury.
These are some night shots via dash cam. The glare is worse than in reality due to the windscreen, but the light coverage is very even but not over bright, with a warmer colour temperature than Lumas and Axia 1s used for casual replacements in the past.
In both cases, the road in the distance is uphill and there are no cars approaching, so the light on the road in the distance is entirely due to the Axias.