143A. A610, Pentrich, Lower Hartshay, Amber Valley, Derbyshire Installed between the A38 junction at Ripley and the B6013 Chesterfield Road at Buckland Hollow are a number of 10 m tubular steel columns, where the majority were still supporting GEC Z9554M 135 Watt SOX (low pressure sodium) lanterns in July 2025. By then, however, the columns and the associated cabling network were in very poor condition (much of the infrastructure was still as it was when installed in the late 1970s, with a portion of carriageway being built on the track bed for the former Ambergate to Pye Bridge railway line, which had closed at the end of 1968), and at the time of photographing, installation of a whole new lighting system was underway, with many of the new columns being of the passive-safe type, owing to the 60 mph speed limit for much of this section of the road's length. By the time that these old columns were being decommissioned, SOX lighting in Derbyshire was highly uncommon, with this being the very last main road in the County to remain lit with the once-ubiquitous lamp type - even then, very few of the lights were still in nightly operation.

This view shows the new and old columns installed at the junction to Lower Hartshay. Formerly, traffic passed beneath the railway line at this point, with the road into Lower Hartshay being the main road, and the existing road then linking up with it. Today, heading down this road results in a dead end - the only through route to Ripley being the A610 itself at this point.

The Derbyshire Green paintwork of the Stewarts & Lloyd bracket on this column is wearing away, revealing a pink undercoat / primer beneath.

A Zodion SS54 two-part photocell detector is positioned on the Z9554M's heavily weathered GRP canopy.

New columns supporting Thorn Isaro Pro-M LED lanterns are interspersed with the outgoing columns fitted with SOX lanterns. Three Philips MA 50s are visible on the approach to the traffic signal junction.

Looking the other way, three of the columns are Abacus base-hinged types, as high voltage cables pass over the road. Formerly, even higher voltage transmission lines passed over above the third of the hinged columns, although as these were decommissioned and removed after 2011, a hinged column was no longer required at this location. As it is, the new columns are positioned away from the remaining HV conductors, as passive-safe hinged columns are not available above 8 m.

The middle column in this image has a WRTL Arc running a 150 Watt SON-T (tubular high pressure sodium) lamp fitted; an earlier replacement for a faulty Z9554M.

New and old are pictured alongside each other.

A little further east, some standard tubular steel replacement columns were used - these are situated behind a crash barrier; thus, they do not need to be passive-safe. Additionally, the new columns are positioned at the other side of the footway, to ensure that the working widths of the barrier are not encroached into.

Whereas the SOX lantern required additional outreach to position it over the carriageway, such are the Isaro's optics that the lantern can be mounted post-top, and still produce a beam that extents sufficiently to the far side of the carriageway.

Nearby, a cut-down stump of one of the old columns can be seen. The steel was in such poor condition at the bases and roots of some columns along here that they required cutting down immediately after undergoing a structural test at some point after June 2019.

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