There is at least one other pylon appreciation website - http://www.pylonofthemonth.org/. I think the guy who runs it may have a bigger claim to being the most dull person in the UK: he limits himself to one post per month on a single topic; he has been externally recognised for the tragic nature of his site and officially he has no interests:
In before, “You must construct additional pylons!”
Oh hell yes…why am I excited about this? I immediately knew I had to become a member.
there are a few things i want to do when i retire and one of them is to travel the united states taking pictures and doing a large-format book on the different styles of highway support pylons that exist across the country. like these–
Wait, what, the content is “Members Only”!?! I want to see some Pylon Erections now!!! Waiting is not an option… Er, I mean “Erecting Pylons”. I can’t even see the “Members Shop”. How am I going to buy little electrical transmission grid erector sets in time for Christmas?
Woah there, Sport. You better keep a lawyer on call full time if you are gonna be taking photos of infrastructure. It’s one of those “crimes” where even white people get hassled. Don’t even think about if if you happen to be even the lightest shade of brown :-0
Make sure that you have your “photographer’s rights” card handy…
Sir, why are you taking all those pictures of bridge supports?
Edit: didn’t notice that @Skeptic brought it up first…
i was privileged enough to be born a white male and leveraged that into the upper-middle class. i’ve been taking pictures of overpass supports for decades now but just in the places i’ve traveled (i wish i were at home, i’d have uploaded something more exciting than that stock shot). i’ve never had law enforcement even look askance at my activities but i appreciate the concern 
High voltage pylons are actually pretty interesting, engineering-wise. Lightweight, fairly cheap design, fairly resilient for the cost as well. And there’s a wide variety of designs, dictated by many factors.
With a little knowledge/training, you can determine the area’s energy sources - if it is a 3-phase or HVDC, how high voltage… And you can do this both “in the field” and from aerial/satellite imagery, if high-res enough (shadows are your friend).
For more IMINT fun, look for US Army Intelligence Center’s "Analyze [subject] on Aerial Imagery. In the case here, the [subject] is “Electrical Power Industries”.
Then there’s the related field of the conductors, usually composite steel-aluminium ropes. Again, fairly wide variety here, to satisfy different constraints, whether it is current, mechanical load, or cost. Using spaced triangles or quads of wires to reduce the field gradients and alleviate the corona losses, inter alia. The shield wires and lightning protection. The Stockbridge dampers and other forms of vibration attenuators.
And then there are the insulators. Electroceramics with special glazes with low alkali content (alkali ions migrate through the material under high fields and the glass/glaze/ceramics is then slightly conductive), glasses… The corona rings to distribute field gradients, and other “weird” designs. The semiconductive glazes, that actually conduct a little in a controlled way - this keeps the field gradient equal and heats the surface a bit to keep away the ice.
And then mix in the weather - the problems of icing on the conductors (which reflect back to the design of the pylons that have to be able to cope with the very significantly increased loads), the deposition of dirt that makes the surface more conductive and subject to creep discharges, the salt aerosols in the vicinity of sea and various other contaminants around cities and process plants (which again lead to corrosion issues with the pylons themselves)…
…and we still did not get even close to the transformers and switches and other parts of the fascinating world of high voltage energetics…
Do it do it do it do it do it do it!!!
The only pylons that I have appreciated are the submissions to the design competition that was held in Iceland…
Pylons of the Future | Infrascape Design
edit to add better link – hard to find a good link to stuff from 6 yrs ago…
there’s whole movies based around pylons. and it’s quite good too. http://m.imdb.com/title/tt0122906/
On the way home from Burning Man, my traveling companion and I took the turnoff at Hoover Dam to admire the vintage pylons. They do some amazing pylon gymnastics to get the power out of the steep canyon. It’s possible to tell which were the original 1930s ones and which were added later.
They got sexier over the decades.
I used to walk past this every morning on the way to uni:
Not the most eye catching of flyovers, but someone seems to have appreciated it:
I have a bigass transmission pylon behind my back fence. It doesn’t effect me. It doesn’t effect me.It doesn’t effect me.It doesn’t effect me.It doesn’t effect me.It doesn’t effect me.It doesn’t effect me.It doesn’t effect me.It doesn’t effect me.It doesn’t effect me.It doesn’t effect me.It doesn’t effect me.It doesn’t effect me.It doesn’t effect me.It doesn’t effect me.It doesn’t effect me.It doesn’t effect me.It doesn’t effect me.It doesn’t effect me.It doesn’t effect me.It doesn’t effect me.It doesn’t effect me.It doesn’t effect me.It doesn’t effect me.It doesn’t effect me.It doesn’t effect me.It doesn’t effect me.It doesn’t effect me.It doesn’t effect me.It doesn’t effect me.It doesn’t effect me.It doesn’t effect me.It doesn’t effect me.It doesn’t effect me.It doesn’t effect me.It doesn’t effect me.It doesn’t effect me.It doesn’t effect me.It doesn’t effect me.It doesn’t effect me.It doesn’t effect me.It doesn’t effect me.It doesn’t effect me.It doesn’t effect me.It doesn’t effect me.It doesn’t effect me.It doesn’t effect me.
Mostly.
I still see a few poles (not the high-voltage transmission lines) that have the old glass insulators when I am driving through the “back woods”.
edit: I need one of each:
All Colors Insulator Gallery
Hail Satan!
It’s damaged the part of your brain that governs spelling.
Not pylons, but I remember seeing these at the Guggenheim.
