Merge Rail Long Section with Overhead Plan Route

Hi,

A little stumped on how to get the result I'm after. 

Here I have an elevation long section (bottom red line) and an over all plan view of the new rail route (top red line). White lines mark 100m incraments, total length is 1800m. I need to merge the two to produce something similar to the top red line but when viewed in isometric view you'll be able to see the rise and fall in the route shown in the long section.

All I have access to is MS SS3, is there a way to wrap one line along the path of another but keep Z levels?

Josh

  • Windsor Link Railway 3D.dgn

    The sectional elevation line is rotated 90 degrees in the image above to show that there is a rise and fall, otherwise all you'd see in top view is a straight line.

  • Five gold stars for supplying good evidence and illustration!

     
    Regards, Jon Summers
    LA Solutions

  • Following on from Makai's suggestion you could perform similar operation with MicroStation :

    1. Create a complex chain of the curved plan elements ( Note one of the segments needs to be moved to the correct Z value to match the others - See image below ).

    2. Use the Construct Points Along element (Points:18) and select the start (left side) and end of the complex chain.

    3. Select all the newly created points and export them to plan.txt file using the 'Export Coordinates' tool

    5. Repeat steps 1-3 above of the Line for the elevation and export the coordiantes to a file called 'Elevation.txt'

    6. Replace the Z values in the plan.txt with the Z values in Elevation.txt and save as Combined.txt

    7. Use the 'Import Coordinates' tool to bring in points using Combined.txt ( Attached )

    480.6682,655.1089,0.0000
    479.2011,555.3773,0.0000
    508.4428,460.2295,-1.5811
    567.2073,379.8871,-3.5810
    649.0254,323.1952,-5.5808
    744.8914,296.4176,-7.5807
    844.5999,289.4368,-9.2000
    942.3812,308.0634,-9.2000
    1029.1020,357.1043,-9.2000
    1110.4822,415.2222,-9.2000
    1191.8624,473.3400,-9.2000
    1273.2427,531.4579,-9.2000
    1345.2595,600.1956,-9.2000
    1390.9012,688.6547,-9.2000
    1411.8347,786.3763,-9.2000
    1430.6535,884.5917,-9.1892
    1436.7241,984.0810,-5.2174
    1452.1632,1082.4684,-2.7000
    

    8. Create new curve from these newly created points if required.



  • Someone may prove me wrong, but I think your only true solution is going to be one of Bentley's civil packages such as InRoads. Even if you could manage to merge the individual points to create a b spline curve, I wouldn;t think that this would be a true representation. From all of my experience, the vertical profile of roads and railroads are built utilizing tangents and vertical curves. The only way I'm aware of to do this is in a civil package that combines a horizontal profile with a vertical profile.