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British electricity pylons

Contents

Overview

Although there has been considerable interest over the years in high voltage electricity infrastructure, there is little in the way of publicly-available collated data on the subject. The details on the various pylon types is scattered about and difficult to find. These pages are an attempt to address this deficiency by bringing information about UK pylon types into a single location. Due to a shortage of source material (some of which has been lost over the decades) the subject coverage will remain incomplete, but the information on these pages will serve as a good starting point.

The term “pylon” is found in everyday usage, although the industry term is “tower” (transmission tower, lattice tower, steel lattice tower). Lattice refers to the open metal framework, compared to the poles more commonly used with the lowest voltages (especially 11 kV, 33 kV and the “trident” 132 kV poles). 33 kV, 66 kV and 132 kV can all be found on both wood poles and lattice towers, and 132 kV also uses metal poles in some areas.

These pages were created to give the World Wide Web coverage on a poorly-understood subject, but they have turned out to be useful even within the industry as an easy-to-use reference source for tower type identification.

See the background page for how this all came to be.

Scope

Ideally, this site would cover every standard pylon (tower) type in British history. Ad hoc towers (for example the many custom PL16 junction and tee-off towers) are generally excluded but some special towers have been included.

Coverage of 132 kV and above is good, with few types left to be illustrated. Material is still needed for the last few 132 kV types, especially CE PL3.

Coverage of 33 and 66 kV is much more limited due to the number of different tower series and severe lack of material for and knowledge about these types. At present there is no expectation of coming close to getting good coverage of these types, but this could change at any time should someone volunteer the information.

The pages cover only lattice towers; T-pylons are not included.

Guides

See the guide page for some helpful information regarding identifying the various tower types.

See the site guide page for the diagram line style key, site conventions etc.

Series

Technical information

The following pages cover various technical aspects of pylons and pylon lines in the UK:

Other

Questions

See the questions page for outstanding questions in need of answers.

Further reading

Exploration

For those inspired to undertake their own pylon hunts:

Pylon photography gives walks a purpose: a destination to reach and goals to achieve. The public footpath map provides routes to explore; try to construct a circular route so that the entire walk is somewhere you’ve never been before. Google Street View helps identify what is out there (for example, the tower series used by a particular line) but in most cases you get to see far more in person, especially away from roads.

All photographs and illustrations (excluding tower type diagrams and illustrations based upon them) are original material and are released to the public domain, unless otherwise stated.

No re-use restrictions are imposed upon the tower type diagrams: subject to the caveats below, you may use the tower type diagrams as you see fit. These diagrams have all been manually traced from a variety of sources including general arrangement drawings, erection diagrams, tower outline drawings (including those already in vector form), photographs (from various sources) and Google Street View.

Copyright status for tower plans is unclear; some however explicitly prohibit tracing in any form. If this is of concern to you, do not re-use tower diagrams derived from official material. Provisional diagrams traced from Google Street View are also illegal, so don’t use these for anything either. Some illustrations incorporate depictions of towers based on tower type diagrams; consider these illustrations to be tainted also.

See the sources page (link below) for further comments regarding Google.

Sources

See the sources page for details of and links to the various source material used by this site.

Acknowledgements

The following people and organisations helped to make this endeavour possible:

Additional data has been sourced from:

Finally, posthumous thanks go to the late Flash Bristow, founder of the Pylon Appreciation Society, who brought pylon lovers together. She sadly passed away before I came onto the scene.