Abstract

Customizing ArcPad for High-Accuracy Position Collection of Rail Assets
Track: Transportation
Authors: Timothy Battin, Douglas Braeckel, Erik Henderson

New Positive Train Control requirements from congress require high accuracy location of critical assets for railroads. CSX maintains +/- 28,000 yard switches and tracks for which it must provide sub-meter positional accuracy. The Yard Stamping project had to integrate into an existing scheduled maintenance application, and bypass ArcPad's native one-record-one-location approach. The project had specific needs that required 3 sets of coordinates to be collected for a switch apparatus at the same time, instead of one single location per record. Each switch was a group of 3 points, each with its own location, but at the same time dependent upon the location and status of the other 2 pieces. Real-world locations were matched to names of existing records, and coordinates were locked in. Trimble GeoXH units using GPSCorrect extension for ArcPad provided the real-time accuracy. Collected data was merged into existing database, which was then refreshed with updated coordinates.