Topic: Rail design in Civil 3D

[kevinh]

I am doing some pre-project planning on how our company can use civil 3d in designing new and relocating rails on a railroad project through a local city.  I see that Civil 3D has a RailSingle Subassembly but they have this note in the help file for it:

NoteThis subassembly is designed for visualization and to demonstrate the use of corridor modeling for rail applications. It is not intended for actual engineering production work.

Why is it not intended for actual engineering production work?  Is it because it doesn't define a "datum"?

Is there any other subassemblies out there that would work for this?  Maybe we are getting too carried away with modeling this kind of work?

Thoughts/comments?

[mjfarrell]

That disclaimer is likely there for at least half a dozen god reasons, like they can't stop you from drawing NON rail centric alignments or profiles and then creating a corridor from that geometry.

As to Ideas, you know I have a couple.   

Depending on how carried away one wants to get, I think this could be done using existing subassemblies in unconventional ways (Link Multi).  And or using the create sub assembly from polyline function.

[kevinh]

I guess what we would want to be able to show is the rail on the cross sections.  I don't necessary need to model it.  Would like to be able to calculate the ballast and sub-ballast quantities.  I am going to try a sample this morning.  How will it show siding tracks tieing into the mainline?

[dfarris75]

That would depend on how you set it up. I would suppose you would create a separate alignment for the siding and simply run the same assembly down it. You may actually need separate assembly's though depending on what's going on between the siding and the main line and how you want to tie it all together.

[mjfarrell]

K-dogg, you are going to have some real fun creating the surface boundaries at the frogs where the two alignments meet