RAIL SURVEYING
Smart Surveying S
onoma-Marin Area Rail Transit (SMART) is an overwhelmingly popular rail initiative in Northern California and is to begin service in 2014. Planners estimate that the new commuter rail system can be built for about $7.1m per mile, which compares very favourably to the cost of extending other local systems.
the past, with SMART’s lead consultant; HDR Engineering,” says James M. Dickey, PLS, president of Cinquini & Passarino Inc. (CPI), a survey firm based in Santa Rosa, California. “We knew from our previous experience that the top- of-rail survey could take months to complete with conventional surveying equipment.”
“Once we learned the software, the field work went very efficiently.”
The Northwestern Pacific railway corridor has been out of service since 1994. The right of way is overgrown in many areas, two existing tunnels will need to be refurbished and the entire track will be redesigned and replaced.
One of the first steps in the redesign of the track is an accurate survey of the existing 70 miles of track. This means good coordinates at regular intervals on both rails. Planners and designers needed to know the location, super-elevation, gauge, location of switches, and so on. This is a major undertaking.
A new way of rail surveying “We worked on the railroad in
CPI was asked to provide details of track and crossing conditions for a northern 60-mile section of the SMART corridor, with rail information at 100 foot stations. With conventional RTK or optical surveying, the work goes slowly and it’s hard to reliably get sufficient accuracy.
Setting and plumbing the rod at consistent points on the rounded top surface of rails is tedious. And, counting off stations along the track adds up as well. CPI wanted to work more efficiently, while providing higher density and more accurate information to their client.
True to form, CPI came up with a better idea for the SMART
58 | rail technology magazine Dec/Jan 11
A rail project in America’s Golden State needed a better, smarter form of surveying. Angus W. Stocking explains how it was done
corridor work. “The project was qualifications-based and we had to figure out the best way to meet project goals. We were challenged with a very tight time schedule,” James explains.
“We saw some information on the Amberg Technologies’ GRP System FX track surveying system in The American Surveyor (April 2009 issue), and we thought it might work perfectly for this.”
Amberg Technologies’ (Regensdorf, Switzerland) rail and tunnel solutions are well established in Europe and Asia, but are just being introduced to the United States. Dickey asked the Kara Company, Inc. (Countryside, IL), Amberg’s
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