This is our last week as temp employees. I can share a little more details now that they have made the job offer and I have accepted. The project that I am working on is for one of the big 5 railroads. The congress has mandated that they must have Positive Train Control in place on all mainline by 2015. This is a Herculean task. Basically, with some exceptions, the railroads are working off of the old val maps still. Now over the years they have been scanned into TIFF's and even been georeferenced into a database. The coordinate system is a modified Albers Equal-Area Conic Projection. All of our work is done in survey feet. The whole road is scheduled to be located by a helicopter system called Fli-map. Before it can be fli-mapped, we have to have an idea where we actually have track, that is where my team came in. For PTC to work, the track must be located accurately in 3D.
We had existing some parts of the track located by various means. The railroad had taken GPS units and installed them on trains and set them out on the rails for like 6 months. This process gives us a rough idea where we actually have track being used. Though not accurate enough to draw track by, it does give us an idea where to be looking for track when we are mapping. Another tool we have available is track that was located by the company a few years back. This gives us a great 2D location of the tracks that it was designed to pick up, however it does not give us an accuracy as tight as the government requires. My team starts our location based on this layer of information. We then take aerial photography and look for track. The company has designed some great tools that run inside of MicroStation Geographics to create lines and nodes that have smart data. MicroStation is the front software and the actual database is stored inside an oracle database. Once we have digitized the track, a preflight crew goes out and takes our map to look and make sure we have not missed anything. Until this week, I worked with the team digitizing track, but now I have been moved to QC'ing the database and making sure that our digitized track matches up with track inside of yards that was outsourced. All is going well on the project and the team I just transferred out of is ahead of schedule. Originally we had 5000+ miles of track projected to locate and to date we have surpassed that number with one more division (kind of like a state but usually bigger) of track still to digitize. The original scope called for 5 months to complete and we have just passed 3 months.
I just got to say, this is the most exciting job I have had the privilege to work on. I get up every morning and I am excited to get into the office and start working on the project. I am learning so much about the software and how to use it to make the job easier.
For those who don't know the terminology, Wikipedia provides a description of Positive Train Control.
It still isn't clear to me why the GPS records of train pathways did not provide accurate enough data for this purpose.
> I just got to say, this is the most exciting job I have had the privilege to work on. I get up every morning and I am excited to get into the office and start working on the project. I am learning so much about the software and how to use it to make the job easier.
Just curious, are you going to be using GeoCue’s railway feature extraction software to pull the features out of the Fli-map lidar data? I know GeoCue just signed a big contract with a railroad that is headquartered "just south of the Georgia border".
Thank you for posting that Matthew. That is fascinating because it delves into giving new life to the old valuation plans, and inspires archive work here. Please keep us updated.
Archives, land surveying, and GIS are all brought into focus!
thank you sir,
david
The GPS was mapping grade autonomous mode. They make a path that is about 40' wide. That is more than is allowable by the standards set forth in the law. While it is accurate enough for us to find the lines on aerial imagery, if a line has not had a train on it in 6 months, we would not see the pings and so we still may not have all we are required to put into the system.
That would be the one 😉 I am hoping that I get to do a little of the post processing. From what I understand the software correlates the images taken during flight with the lidar data, coloring the pixels based on the colors in the image, and it creates a model like you were actually standing there looking at it.
You should see the vault. The day they gave us a tour was awesome. It was like walking into an old clerk of court office. The railroad has deeds that cannot even be found in some courthouses. Another group of workers is cataloging the deeds, scanning them and plotting them into the GIS. Boundary determination is not part of this project, however.
It sounds like a fascinating project. Please continue to post with updates in the future as the project unfolds- I for one would like to hear about the challenges and how you resolve them. I've done some rail projects that involved recreating rail yards based on historic documents as a first step-very cool prjects indeed! Best of luck and looking forward to your future posts on this project.
Chuck
Woo hoo! Congrats all around. 🙂
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