Glasgow street lights - externally wired power supply

[michael769]

Too many wires for a live and neutral return supply, 3-phase is 415v as a minimum.

That distribution point is a mess, reminds me of what you see in some US cities.

[manniemain]

Early electric street lighting installations (1920s+) often used overhead wiring for the simple reason that it was cheaper to install. Out of Britain this is still very common. Leeds and Bradford certainly did this on tram/trolleybus routes using the traction poles and this continued not only to the end of the systems but well beyond still using the same poles. There were also instances in Leeds where traction poles were recovered from abandoned routes and used for street lighting well away from the tram system. This happened from the 30s onwards. Leeds used a 3 wire system, where two wires were used for lighting power and the third was used for control. This enabled several lamps to be switched together from one timer. My home town of Pudsey often used a system where lamp standards drew power from the domestic supply underground but were linked by a single overhead wire which didn't supply power but was used purely for control. These installations used standards which were purpose designed for lighting and were well away from the tramway.

[Focus 2]

Quite a lot of installations in Northumberland and Country Durham utilise overhead power lines with lighting attached.

This installation in Kibblesworth, Gateshead is an example of those used with wooden polls. They're still many cast iron examples too.

The Angel of the North can be seen in the photo.

[Pilgrim Dan]

Plenty around my childhood area. Originally, there were 4/5 domestic supply wires (see street view history), now reduced to one when the street lights were replaced with LEDs. Definitely no trams either.

[orudge]

The streetlights on my street share a pole with overhead wires that run to each house. (And because one of those poles is just inside our garden, rather than outside it, we receive £10/year or something from the electricity company for it!)

Further up the street, the overhead wires head down a side street and run to the back of houses rather than the front, and the streetlights along there are on conventional streetlights.

[Bryn666]

ENW, the electricity provider in this part of the world, is now cajoling local authorities to remove their equipment off electricity poles. Elf and Safety innit.

That means there are always meant to be raise and lower columns in the vicinity of overhead lines now in accordance with G39 best practice but not always...

[WHBM]

ENW, the electricity provider in this part of the world, is now cajoling local authorities to remove their equipment off electricity poles. Elf and Safety innit.

Given the wreckage that electricity providers' contractors regularly leave local authority maintained highways in, I would have thought a robust rebuff would be in order !

A new style of temporary signal at junctions has started to appear in London, where complete junction sets are being replaced. During the works, which commonly last a couple of weeks, temporary signals with about 17-foot high poles and overhead wires connecting them all around the junction are deployed. Presumably they do not appear on any abnormal load height map.

[RichardA35]

..Presumably they do not appear on any abnormal load height map.

DfT map has only two short high routes cleared inside the M25 and none inside the North Circular. I imagine a few cables will be of little concern to a 20' high transformer or similar.

[Brenley Corner]

Lots of villages and rural roads here in Kent have lighting on shared wooden infrastructure. here is a classic example near where I work - STREETVIEW

[sotonsteve]

What we need to do is make the distinction on this thread between street lighting mounted to electrical distribution poles, and street lighting which is specifically fed from overhead whereby the overhead feed only supplies the street lighting.

This thread is not about discussion of the former. The idea of having electricity supplied to property via overhead wires is common across the world, dependent on country of course. Attaching street lights to the poles carrying these wires is logical, because if all your electricity is overhead, why also bury cables underground specifically for street lighting when you can just utilise the electricity poles. Of course, the UK is a bizarre halfway house whereby many streets in the country have electricity both above ground and underground, and the same goes for BT (although with BT they tend to just use poles to distribute from a single point to multiple properties rather than carrying data from pole to pole).

The Glasgow system is different, and as others have said, was also once present in other parts of the UK but now all but gone. Many streets in Glasgow have underground electric cables to supply properties, but instead of individual lighting columns tapping into these cables, they have a significantly smaller number of feed points and carry the electricity for street lighting above ground from column to column. I'm not sure what the rates are like now, but I believe that a service transfer (connection/disconnection to the grid) accounts for more than half the cost of replacing a lighting column, even when replacing a column in the same hole, so doing the maths you can see that if a street lighting department has a private network they can save megabucks in this respect.

[Mikeya]

Indeed Glasgow’s street lighting was fascinating. Another major city that made extensive use of overhead wiring was Manchester and the Manchester Archives sets on Flickr show many examples;

https://www.flickr.com/photos/mancheste ... 44288@N00/

[scott125]

Theres a new wired column been put up on west george st opposite Queen St Station in Glasgow . The wires are not linked to any other column as there isent any but to the buildings .Bit odd for City Centre.

[AndyB]

In my mum and dad's street in Bangor, the first part of the street has bungalows and street lighting mounted on distribution poles - 5 strands (lighting, three phases and return). Further down it changes to houses, the domestic 3 phase supply moves to the side of the houses, and the street lighting goes underground.

In Belfast, after trams and later trolleybuses were taken out of service, their poles remained in place, with lovely big flourescents on top (later replaced by boring Alpha 8s) and three strands running between them. The external wiring was presumably primarily for the traction supply, with street lighting being a side benefit.

[mark3evo]

Here's a rare sighting of some of the Leeds lights I was talking about earlier on Streetview - the poles and arms are identical to those that were all along the A660 (definitely a former tram route) and in a car park at Roundhay Park that was once the tram terminus, but I don't think this street ever carried trams, so perhaps in the days when the Corporation ran both trams and lighting in-house, it fitted the same poles and wiring for lights everywhere.

problem with streetview when its updated above evidence is lost

[Big L]

Here's a rare sighting of some of the Leeds lights I was talking about earlier on Streetview - the poles and arms are identical to those that were all along the A660 (definitely a former tram route) and in a car park at Roundhay Park that was once the tram terminus, but I don't think this street ever carried trams, so perhaps in the days when the Corporation ran both trams and lighting in-house, it fitted the same poles and wiring for lights everywhere.

problem with streetview when its updated above evidence is lost

You've never seen the historic views then?

[WHBM]

Tram and street lighting were commonly provided together at first, often being the very first electricity users, from their own power station, and the street lighting was tapped directly at 550v DC. An earth return was required for the lights, most simply done at high level along the column tops. This approach was generally replaced before the trams were discontinued with normal 240/415v AC systems, with additional wiring needed for these. The lights themselves were sometimes column mounted, but where the tram wires were suspended from span wires between straight poles, some lights were hung from these over the centre of the road.

[RichardA626]

I've seen some pictures of Wolverhampton where the traction posts were kept for street lighting well into the 1980s before being removed.

[scott125]

https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@55.85166 ... 312!8i6656

https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@55.85363 ... 312!8i6656

In Glasgow these two SOX installations can be seen but i dont know what they are and never seen them outside the Glasgow Area

[KeithW]

I remember seeing such lights with cables in Teignmouth on a family holiday back in 1967 and on checking Streetview it would seem they're still there, e.g:

https://goo.gl/maps/IHzim

There is a classic example at Lydd On-Sea in Kent here

https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@50.94839 ... 6656?hl=en

There are two sets of poles, one for power which is run as 3 phase AC , 3 cables carrying each one phase and a 4th for neutral with a tapping for each house to reduce it to 240v. The second set of poles carries the telephone wires.

The ground here is pure shingle which makes it a major pain to try and run cables (or anything else) underground. The water is piped in but there is no mains drainage just a septic tank. In any case people are reluctant to dig holes here. During WW2 both allied and German aircraft in trouble would tend to ditch bombs if they were running for home and the shingle just swallowed them without leaving a crater. If you build a house you have to lay a concrete pad first and the first thing the contractors do is get the metal detectors out. When they were building the houses on Williamson Road they found 2 UXB's which were defused and taken to the Lydd firing range where they blew em up.

PS I think the street lights are a relatively new addition, I dont recall any between 1980 and 1983 when I lived there. You could see the milky way very nicely on a clear night.

[scott125]

Lots of activity with regards to Glasgow streetlights , a lot of wired columns are getting replaced .Many metal poles are now next to the old installations , seen some wired LED arcs in Govanhill . So if you want pics better act soon . Never seen so much activity