Pylons West of Newcastle

[lesc]

A trip out west dropping daughter #1 off at Bolam Lake got me these today:

L6 (previously thought to be L8) supergrid 400KV England - Scotland interconnector on triple conductors:
llandru.servehttp.com/pylons180209/P2180589.JPG

These things are huge.
llandru.servehttp.com/pylons180209/P2180590.JPG
llandru.servehttp.com/pylons180209/P2180592.JPG

Ogle these....
llandru.servehttp.com/pylons180209/P2180593.JPG
and couldn't resist this!
llandru.servehttp.com/pylons180209/P2180595.JPG

AFAIK L66(?)=L1 on the Gorge website these are the ones that started the supergrid off?

Near Whittle Dene Reservoir. L1's marching between Newcastle & Carlisle.
llandru.servehttp.com/pylons180209/P2180596.JPG
L1 with 33kv poles:
llandru.servehttp.com/pylons180209/P2180599.JPG
llandru.servehttp.com/pylons180209/P2180600.JPG

L1 XB234 right by an unclassified road near Whittle Dene.
llandru.servehttp.com/pylons180209/P2180601.JPG

Construction seems different from L2....
llandru.servehttp.com/pylons180209/P2180602.JPG

Marching off to Newcastle:
llandru.servehttp.com/pylons180209/P2180603.JPG

Insulator stringing is a bit odd too.
llandru.servehttp.com/pylons180209/P2180605.JPG

Marching off to Carlisle:
llandru.servehttp.com/pylons180209/P2180608.JPG

Les

[rillington]

Good stuff Les!

Nice to see the rare example of L66 towers.

Nice to see some L8 towers too. I'm trying to think of other places where I've come across L8 towers - possibly in parts of north Wales.

[blueshift]

Excellent photos. I have never seen tripple conductored 400KV with my own eyes, but now I know where to go and look.

[yv47r]

Excellent photos Les

I think the odd conductor arrangement is to minimise conductor clashing and hunting when the power lines across high ground and therefore higher wind speeds in bad weather. The Hutton to Harker and parts of the Trawsfyndd - Pentir routes have similar staggered conductors fitted.

[Flash Bristow]

Feb 18, 2009 15:06:27 GMT -5 rillington said:

Nice to see some L8 towers too. I'm trying to think of other places where I've come across L8 towers - possibly in parts of north Wales.

East London? ;-)

[poyks]

Very nice set of photos, nice to see the ones with the towers marching off into the distance.

[blueshift]

Here are a few pylon piccies I took today up near Baitings Reservoir just inside West Yorkshire.
It was very windy and I got pretty soaked taking them but it was still good fun. I took some pictures of spacers as I seem to remember Dr Fortran saying he wanted some such images.

Spacers on 400KV lines
i466.photobucket.com/albums/rr25/supergrid/DSC_2175.jpg
i466.photobucket.com/albums/rr25/supergrid/DSC_2196.jpg

3x 400KV circuits and 1x 275KV circuit
i466.photobucket.com/albums/rr25/supergrid/DSC_2177.jpg
i466.photobucket.com/albums/rr25/supergrid/IMG_0934.jpg
i466.photobucket.com/albums/rr25/supergrid/IMG_0941.jpg

[Dr Fortran]

lesc:

Nice photos.

The alleged L8 towers are actually L6 on the Cockenzie-Eccles-Stella line. If you see towers carrying either triple or quad bundles of conductors, you can be sure they're L6. With twin bundles, it can be quite hard to tell l6 from L8 sometimes, particularly with the slimmer varieties of L6.

I really need to put the L66/L1 thing to bed. It all arose from an SSEB engineer I worked with referring to the L66 towers on the Strathaven-Harker line (now replaced with L8) as "approximately L1" when speaking to a CEGB colleague. I knew that Strathaven-Harker was the first 275kV double-circuit installation and wrongly inferred that L66 had subsequently been standardised as L1. As far as we know there never was an L1 and the predecessor to the widely-used L2 and L3 series was L66.

yv47r has the conductor thing correct. The staggered conductors with no spacers are used in situations where wind would be liable to start the conductors galloping. The effect of wind over a twin bundle can generate lift as a result of one conductor being in the slipstream of the other. Separating the conductors and allowing them to swing independently alleviates this. In some cases plastic hoops are put on one conductor to prevent the pair from being pulled together by the magnetic fields resulting from the current flowing through them. Someone on this board posted photos of L6 towers in N Wales with that configuration.

Blueshift:

Thanks for the excellent photos of spacers. With your permission, I'll use these on the page about conductors that I'm working on. They are both examples of spacer-dampers. The hinges built into them are sprung and damped so that they can absorb vibrational energy.

[blueshift]

Dr fortran

Please feel free to use my spacer / damper pictures - if you need higher resolution than photobucket let me know. I also posted the hoop spacer picture you refer to. here it is again
i466.photobucket.com/albums/rr25/supergrid/Electric%20Power/IMG_1717.jpg

Nick

[Flash Bristow]

Ooh. I'm not aware of having seen them before!

I do get a lot of kids asking why there are orange balls on the lines though.

[lesc]

Feb 24, 2009 18:25:16 GMT -5 Flash Bristow said:

Ooh. I'm not aware of having seen them before!

I do get a lot of kids asking why there are orange balls on the lines though.

It's so the swans, geese, etc can see the lines!
==

Once again Dr Fortran I bow to the superior knowledge. Flash could you please update your site sometime as I'm using it to try and ID pylons.... especially the L1 / L66 thing. If my dad were alive he would be able to tell me... but he isn't no more...

Only in Britain could you start something new like the supergrid off in the '50s with something like L66.... where beforehand it was presumably PL16... rather than PL17 or L1

[Flash Bristow]

Sorry - will update as soon as I can - might be today but definitely this week. Thanks for the reminder.

(If I start doing one small job I will find myself getting lost in updates and procrastinating, and I have a lot of work on!!!)

[lesc]

If you want the full sized pics for your website - things like the Newcastle L66's and the other stuff like the L6/7/8,33KV PL16 and the unidentified pylons including the suspension / deviation tower at Ardrishaig let us know as the originals are a lot larger cheers Les