Testing out the trolley on a bridge. Getting a feel for the software and workflow. Next time the prism will be much, much lower.
If you didn't have such lumpy terrain you wouldn't need so many bridges. Fill in all the gaps to form thousands of lakes. Challenge Minnesota on the Land of Lakes claim to fame. Doing this in blighted urban areas might take care of some other problems at the same time.
BTW, that looks like a neat toy. Bet it will simplify your work plus probably provide you with more data than you routinely take all of the time.
It really is cool. With one shot to the prism or point collected with the GPS, you can extract 6 measurements. It would take 3 locations and 2 measurements by hand to do it any other way.
Cool
That is super.
Ever heard of Finleyville, located about 10 miles south of downtown Pittsburgh. That is where my children's grandmother grew up and the home to a whole bunch of their relatives. I swear everyone living there must have one leg shorter than the other or they would topple over. When they say they are going to go "up" to the garden, by golly that's exactly what they mean.
One of our lines runs from Pittsburgh to Washington, PA and goes through Finleyville.
Great photos! Thanks for sharing.
I'm curious
I know you work for the RR, but how much lead time do you need to plan on to shut down a section of track? And how long a window will they give you to do your work?
I'm curious
I try to give our operations guys as much notice as I can, but sometimes it is the same day. What typically happens when I need total access like on a bridge is I will get track from our dispatcher from a certain milepost to a certain milepost. No one can come onto the track between those mileposts. When we did that bridge yesterday, I had track from the road crossing at the one end of the bridge our end of track at the other side. The train that was coming down the line had to stop at that road crossing until I gave them permission to come onto the track I was occupying. We took a break, cleared the tracks and let them pass, but they had to wait for me to give the go ahead. A wathman is needed to do this also. Most of the time, I fall under "lone worker" guidelines and don't have to let anyone know where I'm going to be working or coordinate with anyone. When I do this, I can't set the truck on the tracks, use power tools. Even when I do this, I always let everyone I can know when and where I'll be just for my piece of mind. Someone will always call me and let me know when the train is about 30 minutes away from where I am.
Can you rig up a lawnmower engine to it?
I can think of a dozen ways to have fun with that rig, but not one of them has anything to do with walking behind it...
I'm curious
Hi,
that's very interesting to see and hear you can pull a lot of extra data from this toy.
The pictures are great and I see you guys have a lot of fun in the field. Did you have to change your general workflow/processing/reporting for the toy or doss it fit very well into your way of working.
Despite the strict safety regulations I think I would be looking permanently over my sholder for an ghost train when I would be doing your job.
Nice Post!
Christof.
You'd think there would be a way to incorporate the level sensors into the vehicle itself when using the GPS then mount the GPS on the Vehicle? Just curious
I'm curious
It's really just getting used to new software. It has the same look and feel as Access/Survey Controller, so being a Trimble user, it's a comfortable fit. It really speeds up my field workflow and you can set it to do continuous topo based on distance with the robot or GPS.
We own/operate 4 short line railroads. Our speed is only 10 mph which makes it pretty hard to not see a train, but like I mentioned, I let a bunch of people people including the train crews for the line I'm going to be on know where I'm going to be. Usually once a train passes where I am, I don't typically see it again.
Link to info about the system
Is the trolly sending tilt info for superelevation and to compensate for the pole being out of plumb?
Also measuring the track guage?
Link to info about the system
Yes. The pole is perpendicular to the trolley at all times. It has inclination and gauge sensors that it uses along with the geometry of the trolley its self to obtain rail, centerline, gauge and super elevation values.
Awesome! You're having WAAAAY too much fun, Adam!
Dave
Okay Adam,
Funny you should post those today. I spent yesterday in a series of tunnels doing clearance surveys using an Amberg trolley.
I'n not sure why they are worried about the tunnel, the 90lb track had so much head flow the cart got stuck.
Actually I was just there as an observer, we are looking at doing a big slab track project for which we will use the trolley for its layout capacity.
P.s. I really need to start wearing my glasses when I take photos. The portal looked like it was in focus when I took the shot.
John Putnam
very cool! unfortunately, we don't have train tracks around here that are actually used.
We might be looking at the scanner for our trolley in the future for tunnels and a few bridges. It definitely makes things a lot easier.
