End of the road for Mellor signals?

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mr_marcrumbleton
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Re: End of the road for Mellor signals?

Post by mr_marcrumbleton »

ReissOmari wrote: Tue Aug 17, 2021 11:10 Theres a full set of mellors here which appear to be some of the oldest surviving mellors in Birmingham.
Next time I'm in the Birmingham area I'll have to go for a look at these, they look pretty vintage! (gonna guess roughly mid 80s vintage, and GEC)
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Gareth
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Re: End of the road for Mellor signals?

Post by Gareth »

There's been a post replacement, given away by the taller terminal cap. It also looks fairly recent, given the clean appearance, so it's nice that they remounted the mellors back onto it.

Also, someone with a stepladder and a bucket of soap and water wouldn't go a miss for the lenses here.
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L.J.D
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Re: End of the road for Mellor signals?

Post by L.J.D »

Gareth wrote: Sat Jan 22, 2022 00:33 There's been a post replacement, given away by the taller terminal cap. It also looks fairly recent, given the clean appearance, so it's nice that they remounted the mellors back onto it.

Also, someone with a stepladder and a bucket of soap and water wouldn't go a miss for the lenses here.
Same with the street light lantern bowls in the side roads they look very murky indeed too. In fact that area looks like it would benefit from a lot of new street furniture.
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Re: End of the road for Mellor signals?

Post by Rambo »

Recently passed this all Mellor site in Heswall https://www.google.com/maps/@53.3293818 ... 384!8i8192
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traffic-light-man
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Re: End of the road for Mellor signals?

Post by traffic-light-man »

mr_marcrumbleton wrote: Thu Jan 20, 2022 21:06
ReissOmari wrote: Tue Aug 17, 2021 11:10 Theres a full set of mellors here which appear to be some of the oldest surviving mellors in Birmingham.
Next time I'm in the Birmingham area I'll have to go for a look at these, they look pretty vintage! (gonna guess roughly mid 80s vintage, and GEC)
They look like Plessey to me, but likely 80s by the looks of it.
Rambo wrote: Mon Jan 24, 2022 21:00 Recently passed this all Mellor site in Heswall link
I thought I'd posted those in the Pure Mellors thread, but it seems like I didn't! I had taken some pretty poor photos, including a shot of the lone Mellor Wig Wag that stands guard outside the Ambulance Station, which presumably is designed to work in tandem with a hurry call at the junction.
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Re: End of the road for Mellor signals?

Post by Rambo »

traffic-light-man wrote: Wed Jan 26, 2022 12:13
mr_marcrumbleton wrote: Thu Jan 20, 2022 21:06
ReissOmari wrote: Tue Aug 17, 2021 11:10 Theres a full set of mellors here which appear to be some of the oldest surviving mellors in Birmingham.
Next time I'm in the Birmingham area I'll have to go for a look at these, they look pretty vintage! (gonna guess roughly mid 80s vintage, and GEC)
They look like Plessey to me, but likely 80s by the looks of it.
Rambo wrote: Mon Jan 24, 2022 21:00 Recently passed this all Mellor site in Heswall link
I thought I'd posted those in the Pure Mellors thread, but it seems like I didn't! I had taken some pretty poor photos, including a shot of the lone Mellor Wig Wag that stands guard outside the Ambulance Station, which presumably is designed to work in tandem with a hurry call at the junction.
Yep that Wig Wag is still there too. I wasn't in a position to stop and photograph on this occasion. I feel the need to go back at some point.
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Dave908
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Re: End of the road for Mellor signals?

Post by Dave908 »

Dave908 wrote: Sat Jan 08, 2022 15:35 What I think are now the oldest set of Mellors in the St Helens borough here (I may be wrong with this though) are due to be replaced as part of a cycle infrastructure scheme.

I believe the number of junctions in St Helens featuring Mellors may be countable on one hand (I'm sure Simon will know more :)) so it may not be long until they're all gone.
Correcting myself here, there are two other sets of Mellor signals in the St Helens area, both at single file bridges:
Woodlands Road with one LED replacement on the other side.
Baxters Lane with a Microsense head for cyclists

The pedestrian crossing on King St was clinging on for years but is being removed now last seen here
The set at the junction of Peasley Cross Lane and Marshalls Cross Road is hanging on as the upgrade scheme is yet to start.
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Re: End of the road for Mellor signals?

Post by dannylonglegs »

There's a whole junction/ped crossing setup of old signals by Surrey Quays station. Are all of these Mellors?
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Gareth
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Re: End of the road for Mellor signals?

Post by Gareth »

Looks like it, to me.
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L.J.D
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Re: End of the road for Mellor signals?

Post by L.J.D »

There is this nicely looked after set here with a mixture of 300mm and 200mm arrows and pedestrian heads. Makes you wonder if it was deliberately done to keep it all Mellor when heads were knocked down or damaged as the 200mm were later.
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traffic-light-man
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Re: End of the road for Mellor signals?

Post by traffic-light-man »

L.J.D wrote: Wed Mar 02, 2022 17:11 There is this nicely looked after set here with a mixture of 300mm and 200mm arrows and pedestrian heads. Makes you wonder if it was deliberately done to keep it all Mellor when heads were knocked down or damaged as the 200mm were later.
I think it's more likely that it's just a result of having Traffic Systems CoOp as the maintenance contractor in that area when they were still using Mellors, which was well in to the 2000s. I always thought it looked good when Halton Borough Council and Cheshire County Council had TSC as the contractor and exactly this arrangement would result, though it had quite the opposite effect when a modular head would be replaced with a Mellor!

I like the 200mm masks on TSC Mellors, they're a bit of a nice quirk in the development of signals.
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Re: End of the road for Mellor signals?

Post by Rambo »

Just keeping this thread going as i do look out for Mellors and have seen quite a few still hanging around. These below were in Maghull last week.
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Re: End of the road for Mellor signals?

Post by L.J.D »

I don't know if this video has been shared on here before but it shows a Mellor London in 1999 loads of them and no modulars. It's mad because it appears London was installing brand new Mellors well into early 2000 because I know a few sites on that video that had mellors recently but in different configurations than on the video. The rest of the country would of been installing modular heads by then yet London lagged behind. Though it's not surprising given how London were the same with LED heads they installed brand new halogen modular sites well into 2015 while the rest of the country had been installing LED heads for a good while. I was pretty surprised at the time living in London seeing full halogen modular sites been installed namely on the A406 bounds green widening scheme and at main junctions on the A10.
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Re: End of the road for Mellor signals?

Post by MotorwayGuy »

I've always been surprised how well Mellors survived in London. Even in the outer boroughs such as Bexley this trend exists, one of the latest new Mellor junctions I know of is this, which would have been installed in 1999 when the original Watling Street was built over (this was formally a 4-way junction, but strangely the signals a few yards down which would have been installed at around the same time were modular. That set has now been removed but some Mellor heads still remain here. I was also surprised in 2013 when these were installed, as the neighbouring KCC had pretty much replaced every signal with LED ones in around 2008/2009.
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Re: End of the road for Mellor signals?

Post by L.J.D »

The X crossing at Oxford Circus opened with halogen peek elites also in 2009 and then in 2015 they were replaced with the awful Telent 4G heads they currently have. I found that absolutely ludicrous because they didn't just change the heads over they redid the whole lot poles as well so wasteful. I don't know why that was done so soon after because they could of easily just replaced the aspects with LED ones instead of replacing the whole lot. Though I suspect it was down to Telent getting the TfL signal contract and wanting their heads there. Also I've noticed London have once again fell behind in another way alot of councils outside London are now installing low level access signal poles. London are still installing the traditional pole cap ones.
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Re: End of the road for Mellor signals?

Post by traffic-light-man »

L.J.D wrote: Sun Jul 03, 2022 17:04It's mad because it appears London was installing brand new Mellors well into early 2000 because I know a few sites on that video that had mellors recently but in different configurations than on the video. The rest of the country would of been installing modular heads by then yet London lagged behind.
I don't think it's that unusual, Siemens were still supplying Mellors into the 2000s, as well as Traffic Systems CoOperative and in some edge cases Peek.

TfL and its predecessors certainly used to have a rigorous approval process to use equipment on the network, which is why they solely used Peek Elite halogen and Siemens Helios (full-array) LED heads for quite some time. There was a brief affair with the Microsense MSH fitted with Coeval LEDs (IIRC) for mast arms as well, but I don't think they got out of the 'test' phase. I get the impression this changed significantly with the current set of contracts, which is why you've now got a complete mix of kit all over the capital.
L.J.D wrote: Sun Jul 03, 2022 23:06 The X crossing at Oxford Circus opened with halogen peek elites also in 2009 and then in 2015 they were replaced with the awful Telent 4G heads they currently have. I found that absolutely ludicrous because they didn't just change the heads over they redid the whole lot poles as well so wasteful. I don't know why that was done so soon after because they could of easily just replaced the aspects with LED ones instead of replacing the whole lot. Though I suspect it was down to Telent getting the TfL signal contract and wanting their heads there.
Siemens/Yunex offer their retrofit LED door for the Elite, which had Siemens have won that contract, would have been a likely contender for that site given the amount of work it would have saved. I think the problem with Telent is that they're less likely to want to convert something existing as they don't have the same options, so will just low-ball a cost to rip it all out and put their own in, which is wasteful like you say - that's only speculation, mind you. The same might go for Cubic, though given they're buying in equipment from everyone else anyway, they might be more open to using things like the Yunex retrofit doors or perhaps just fitting Aldridge modules in the Elites, though I'm not sure the latter is something I've seen.

The other thing to bear in mind these days is that some companies are reluctant to use 3rd party LEDs with their controllers, particularly with ELV equipment, which often means heads get replaced when the controller does. This of course was never the case with halogen given a lamp is a lamp irrespective of what head you put it in.
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Re: End of the road for Mellor signals?

Post by Gareth »

traffic-light-man wrote: Tue Jul 05, 2022 08:27I don't think it's that unusual, Siemens were still supplying Mellors into the 2000s, as well as Traffic Systems CoOperative and in some edge cases Peek.
If anything, it's pretty normal for 1999, I would have thought. That was the first year I saw modern modular signals, which were Peek Elites at the Breeze Hill/Southport Road intersection in Bootle, now gone themselves. Liverpool proper would've been all Mellor, bar the sole surviving tin lantern installation that finally went in 2001. Most other cities would've been almost entirely, if not wholly, Mellor at the time.

And whilst Liverpool largely switched to Microsense in 2000, Mellors were still going up here and there. The last I recall was the partial refurbishment of the staggered Jolly Miller junction of Queens Drive, where due to one half of the junction having its road layout altered, they replaced the signals on that side of the junction with brand new Siemens-branded Mellors. The other half kept their Page Mellors which had replaced the previous tin lanterns around 1989/90. This would've been in 2003. The whole site was finally fully refurbished once more about three or four years ago now.
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Re: End of the road for Mellor signals?

Post by L.J.D »

I never saw any new mellors around Yorkshire past 2000 the last mellors I actually recall been installed was the Town End ones at Pontefract around 1997 which have been removed now and replaced with roundabouts. Once I saw these installed in 2000 and another set I only saw Peek Elite and MSH and Helios. Barnsley was another place where they installed only Helios after 2000. Though there is a junction near Morley that was installed as mellor after then though I suspect that's because it was developer funded as it was put in as part of a new housing development (maybe mellors were cheaper than newer kit). In other places I only saw mellors used as casual replacements at existing mellor sites. But I saw MSH heads more than mellor as replacements when junction alterations were made. I wonder if TfL had surplus mellor stock stored away ? Because I recall them using mellor heads for temporary traffic lights for a good while as well past 2010.
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Re: End of the road for Mellor signals?

Post by OliverH »

https://www.google.com/maps/@55.9660165 ... 384!8i8192

These seem to have been well looked after as they have recently had their borders whitened up.
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Re: End of the road for Mellor signals?

Post by Rambo »

Saw this elderly Mellors in Chester recently https://www.google.com/maps/@53.1951713 ... 384!8i8192
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