SignalTraffic Forums

Hehe - the Mellor lantern. Probably all heared it's name banded around before.

David Mellor, designer of lots of things, primarily Cutlery and Street Furnitue (quite how them two are linked, I have no idea). Ministry of Transport (MoT), now the DfT, comissioned him to design them a new type of signal to replace the Plessey Tin and SGE lanterns. In 1971-3, the Mellor lantern was eventually released en masse for all to purchase, and slowly, the decline of the tin lantern and SGE begun... Mellor lanterns were still in production by several companies in 2001, and in the early part of 2002, Siemens released thier Helios Modular signal, thus rendering Traffic Systems Co-op the only active manufacturer of Mellor lanterns, as they still are, mainly providing lanterns to Ireland and South Yorkshire, East Riding of Yorkshire, along with Norht Wales, Cheshire, and other counties.

The Mellor head is standard across the board by terms of basic design, however there are a few subtle differences between each manufacturers' concept of the Mellor design.

Anyway, theres a breif background, any questions, please fire away.

interesting signal

but do you have pictures from details and the signal open?

Yeah, I sure do.

There are lots of other points and companies to be mentioned here, of which I will do shortly, however being lazy, I had posted these elsewhere so already had the images ready for posting

Plessey Mellor Heads:





Close ups of the left turn heads. What is going on with that border?! It's new sticky 3M tape the council have started to use instead of re-applying a border, usually when the heads a nearly due for replacement it seems.
And yes, the regulatory arrow or the green arrows have slipped. BTW, in UK TSRGD (our MUTCD), which is law over here, a green arrow can not be less than 180 degrees horizontal, and a blue arrow can only point left, right or ahead, as it is actually a road sign, not a signal, and the reg arrow can only point left, right or ahead as a sign






GEC Mellor Heads:

omg!!

look like an alien ship xD



I need a UK Trafficlight^^

The lime-coloured broad-arrow is really nice! It's sad to see they are getting replaced with 210mm arrows. . . .

David

Ampelfan1984 wrote:omg!!

look like an alien ship xD

Yeah, GEC's famous speciality were these long tunnel louvers that didn't seem to make it onto other heads, Plessey and Page usually using Box louvering or Long Tunnel visors for this kind of thing.

Amplefan1984 wrote:I need a UK Trafficlight^^

I'm prettey sure that could be aranged in the future

dlau wrote:The lime-coloured broad-arrow is really nice! It's sad to see they are getting replaced with 210mm arrows. . . .

Two points made there Dave!

1)
Plessey Tin and SGE's lanterns both had all 200mm optics from the 1930s, and we had never before used 12" in the UK. In 1968 the mellor head came along and changed all that, 12" optics were now employed for use with symbolic aspects.

In 2003, with the impending release of LED heads en masse, and the widespread adaptation of Sira lenses by signal companies, the deicision was taken to modify the TSRGD (our MUTCD equivelent) to accomodate for only 8"/200mm lenses. The origonal idea was that becuase the light output was poor, by todays standards, from a mellor lense, the symbolised aspects needed to be larger due to the reduced light output because of the mask. This was back in 1960s though, so I can imagine how they would have thought it would last forever!

As of Jan 2009, there is only one company left now making 200mm Mellor heads (with 200mm aspects on Non-Sira lenses), which is TSC (Traffic Systems Co-op) who have always provided this iconic signal from when the other companies stopped.

2)
One major design fault with the 12" mellor aspects was that they faded in the sun (and bulb heat) over time, from thier true colour, green to Lime and red to Orange.

I'm not sure if I mentioned, but just to let you know, there is some more info on these signals on this page on my website:

Link

Man. UK signals look soooo cool. I like the signal with the long tube louvered visors.

they sure do by the way Simon is that 3M tape reflective
if not its not worth putting on the borders

This thread hasn't been active in about 4 years. Talk about a bump.