Crane Rail Surveyor

perigon84, post: 354961, member: 2008 wrote: I am a surveying technician working for a crane service group doing rail analysis for large industrial crane runways. They resemble in construction with railroad tracks, but are suspended on large steel beams inside industrial factories, steel and paper mills, etc. My question is does anyone out there have any experience with this type of rail analysis and is there any established software to perform the math and create charts and graphs to demonstrate the alignment, elevations, etc... with their respective deviations from OSHA specifications. I'm in the market for some software of even ideas how this can be done faster than a manual analysis using Excel spreadsheets.

A lot of survey software can be used for looking at rail (railroad) surveys. I use n4ce, it's quite popular in UK.
This will label up the gauge and cant between the rails quite quick. Also offsets from straight lines and curves. Vertical grades can be labelled.

If you wanted to analyze them for alignment, eg take off spirals then bentley rail track does a least squares analysis of the existing and will give you the required adjustments to make it fit a "perfect" alignment. Pretty heavy duty software though.

As I know there are some custom made analyzing SW for service crane groups (Kone) but I haven't seen any for purchase. The best way is to write your own program or use a close friend professional programmer as I did it.
If you do it in Excel there is a quite difficult to create a nice and easy to read charts and graphs for technicians.

The cranes sound like what's used in the granite industry in my area. I doubt anybody around here would use such software but its possible. Google Elberton Granite Association. Someone there may be able to point you in the right direction.

I've done this a couple of times for train tracks and modelled both the plan and vertical shape in Civil 3D using a longitudinal profile view. You can set a band at the bottom to show amount of deviation from a reference line (another profile).

Stacy Carroll, post: 451951, member: 150 wrote: The cranes sound like what's used in the granite industry in my area. I doubt anybody around here would use such software but its possible. Google Elberton Granite Association. Someone there may be able to point you in the right direction.

Such companies mostly uses services of crane manufactures for this survey (if I am not mistaken) and they have to follow CMAA standards regarding allowed deviations in many measured parameters. This kind of SW is hardly to buy as it is a part of a know-how. It is a very specific program and the user should know exactly what is he doing. For the same reason I wouldn't sell my program. Any mistake in this industry is very expensive.