Jacobs

VMX-450 Blue Mountains MLS  - Kinematic Envelope Assessment

Project

Undertake a MLs data capture of the Blue Mountains Line, approximately 76km of rail corridor to undertake Kinematic envelope assessment of new passenger rolling stock - New Intercity Fleet (NIF), to enable and support planned route clearance works.

 The major challenges of the project where that the existing rail corridor is notable for its winding alignment with significantly steep grades and sharp radius curves including numerous changes of alignment and included 10 tunnels. The entire corridor was captured during daytime and had to be undertaken in between normal passenger train movements.

The project required clearance detection and Kinematic Assessment producing infringement mapping (clearance detection measurements) with a relative accuracy of +/- 10mm.

In addition the resultant MLS point cloud was then used for extracting and modelling rail infrastructures to support detailed design.

 Methodology

Jacobs used our VMX450 fixed to a high rail vehicle to undertake the capture, completing multiple runs in the up and down rail direction to provide suitable rail corridor and associated feature coverage from the combined point cloud and sufficient redundancy by measuring numerous system trajectories.

 Utilizing pre-targeted track control marks visible within the cloud with reliable survey uncertainty to achieve project accuracy tolerances, a combination of Riprocess and tie points were used to process and adjust the multiple sensor trajectory passes and resultant scans, to produce a single homogeneous project point cloud for the purposes of kinematic analysis and feature extraction.