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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.

Guide

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

Diagram line style key
Solid line Solid lines indicate elements that have been taken from official material. The line thickness is always 1 pixel regardless of the size of the steel bar. The accuracy of these lines depends entirely on the quality of the source material; even general arrangement and erection diagrams are not always accurate.
Solid line Thin lines indicate elements at the rear of the tower, such as zig-zag bracing on Eve and BICC L6 peaks and crossarms that are different from front to back.
Dashed line Medium dashed lines indicate optional components such as crossarm extensions and outriggers. This is an official convention in industry drawings.
Dashed line Short dashed lines indicate bracing members that are not always present due to variations in design and amendments to towers.
Dotted line Dotted lines indicate approximations, typically diagrams derived from sources such as Google Street View. This is done when no diagram is available or the diagram is incomplete or inaccurate.
Broken dotted line Broken dotted lines indicate optional components within approximated diagrams.
Dashed line 40% opacity indicates a tower type where the design is known but no examples had been constructed at the time that the diagram was posted to the site.

Series

See the pylon series page for an overview to UK pylon series, starting with recognition diagrams of many of the common types. See the unidentified types page for those types not assigned a designation. See the schemes page for known schemes.

See also the pylon comparison page for help identifying tower series and the organisations page for virtually no information on some organisations.

Technical information

This site is intended more as a “spotter’s guide” to pylons, but nonetheless the following pages covers some of the technical aspects of pylons and power lines in the UK:

Other

Questions

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

Further reading

Conventions

For the sake of consistency, certain conventions are applied to the material on these pages.

Tower diagrams

The tower diagrams on this site are based on a variety of source material. The source material takes a variety of forms from simple wire mesh diagrams (as used on this site) through to detailed erection diagrams. Since it is not possible to obtain detailed plans of every tower type, and because a significant number of source diagrams are simple wire meshes, all diagrams presented here are in simple wire mesh form. Wire mesh outlines do contain a number of simplifications; in particular, bracing members tend to be shown meeting at single points where in reality they may not do so. Gusset plates are omitted, even for tower types where they are a highly prominent feature of the design, for example L7 angle towers.

The depiction of insulators in suspension tower diagrams is being harmonised to generic types. The length of an insulator string (tension or suspension) including the size, shape and count of units within the string depends on various factors beyond simply the voltage, so the generic forms shown on this site are for clarity only. Likewise, the colours shown have no bearing on the actual materials used, which vary considerably across the country. Insulators are not shown for tension towers.

Chirality

Some towers (especially SEE PL1(a) single circuit) are flipped horizontally for consistency with respect the official drawings, to make recognition easier. In practice it appears that some lines no longer follow the correct practice of front/rear face anyway (when looking along the line towards higher-numbered towers, the front face of the tower is facing you).

Nomenclature

Industry nomenclature has changed in accordance with changes to British practice. For example, a “Mrs Smith” might now work at the “BBC”, while previously a “Mrs. Smith” would have worked at the “B.B.C.” The Tower Bible goes the other way and uses extraneous punctuation for no reason at all. For example, the Blaw Knox standard tower is given as “D.2.° TOWER.” with extraneous dots. (The dot in “2.°” is written under the degrees symbol.) Conventionally, deviation angles were written with the degrees symbol, but this has since been dropped. What was once written “D.30°” or “D.T.” is now simply “D30” or “DT”.

This site follows current practice entirely, regardless of the design age of any tower type.

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 helped to make this endeavour possible:

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.