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Trimble Access – Road Template?
Posted by FrankG on December 6, 2021 at 1:29 amOur survey crews pretty much do all their own work for road and highway construction using Survey Pro. We are about to demo Trimble Access. I want to know as I have not found anything on building a road file inside Access. Can a road be built inside Access? How simple is it to do? Our field survey manager seem to think he will have to have the office tech build all roads in TBC. I want to be ahead on if Access can build internal road and any tips to build them??
rover83 replied 1 year, 7 months ago 5 Members · 7 Replies- 7 Replies
Are you demoing just Access, or Access with the Roads module?
It’s super simple to work with an alignment inside of Access, but you really need Roads to work with corridors and templates effectively.
Honestly, I wouldn’t have the crew build anything themselves unless they’re savvy with digital design drawings. That can all be done in Civil3D or TBC and pushed to the crew through the cloud.
If you have good digital files, grab an alignment and profile from a C3D design drawing, export to LandXML, check it in TBC, and send it on to the crew. Why have the crew generate it and check it themselves when they could be spending that time putting wood in the ground?
“…people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.” -Neil PostmanYou can build a road in Access. I went from Survey Pro to Access. It was a difficult transition, but doable. The softwares have some similarities, but some pretty big differences. Print off the Access Roads Help/Instructions/Manual. Don’t assume you know what to do without it if you are coming from Survey Pro.
Access is just as good as Survey Pro for roads, just different.
After having the roads module within access, and then switching companies and not having it for the last 3 years (thankfully just got a new TSC5 and roads again), I really know how useful it was. Once you get the hang of it, you can’t go without it. Having the capability to not only modify your horizontal alignment, vertical profile along that alignment, and all your templates/typical sections, makes staking anything along that corridor possible.
Particularly one project that stands out was one that the design road did not tie into our existing road centerline very well so we had to warp it in the field from a couple hundred feet back and into the existing…by surveying the existing road section, we modified the horizontal alignment for the centerlines to match, the vertical profile to tie in smoothly, and the exterior lanes of the design road to match into the existing edges…after creating the templates at the existing road and where we would start warping from design, Access does all the interpolation in the middle so we were still able to continue blue tops at centerline and each edge.
I have no experience with Survey Pro so I cannot speak to the crossover at all, but I do thoroughly love the roads module for all alignment staking.
So it seems as we took to long to decide on getting new equipment and the money got spent on other departments. I still would like to have some notes on how to build a road inside Access. Any notes anyone wants to pass along.
> I still would like to have some notes on how to build a road inside Access. Any notes anyone wants to pass along.
Maybe this video would be a good place to start
There is also a copy of the roads manual on line
https://help.trimblegeospatial.com/TrimbleAccess-PDFs/2022.00/en/TA_Roads.pdf
Trimble sort of expect you will actually do your road definition in Business Centre – maybe worth having a hunt around the TBC tutorials too
I second @jimcox ‘s suggestion, the Roads manual is pretty solid.
The Access Roads help database also has excellent explanations of what different functions mean complete with graphics that show what different options will do to the corridor.
There’s not really a “quick-start” to Roads, or a Cliff’s Notes version, at least not with respect to building a corridor. It’s one of those things you just have to dive into and really read about to get a handle on.
Staking using Roads, however, is super easy and intuitive.
“…people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.” -Neil Postman
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