Laser Scanning 76km of NSW railway

At work we are in the middle of the mother of all NSW rail scanning jobs. I know a couple of people on this forum will be quite excited about this, I know I am.
We are scanning from Lithgow to Springwood. Laser scanning involves getting a million points per second of the coordinates in 3D space of everything that the scanner sees. From this you can measure everything, ballast height, stanchion sizes, bridge dimensions, roof angles, station and building dimensions, all sorts of things up to curve radius and super-elevation. Basically every parameter relevant to the line.
In addition I am running the 360 degree panoramic camera on this job too, taking 6 images every 10m along the line. Basically this is a massive amount of data.
Once again we do this from a hi-rail vehicle, but this time we are doing it while the line is active, so we have to move between train movements. This is teaching me a lot about train control and signalling movements.

This is the view out the rear window around Dargan just to whet Richard's appetite for one.
As it is live track and we move slowly, we often have to wait in various refuges along the line, this allows for various photo opportunities, such as this

It will take quite a while to process all the point data and I do not intend sharing it, it's not our data anyway, but I will be able to find out many sizes of things. Plus the dataset will be close to 1TB! I intend to make my own stanchions and I've always loved the variety of them up the mountains and this allows to make lots of accurate measurements of all of their proportions.
I do intend to show many photos in this thread of line-side objects to help people model things that might otherwise get forgotten as they are often seen in very quick passing from the window.
We are running again tomorrow and I have a very early start, so this is all for tonight.
Cheers
Tony

 

In this thread I will also place lots of photographs that I had the opportunity to take. Here is one of the typical sort of building that if someone described it to you, you wouldn't believe it, or if you saw it on a model you would assume that a mistake was made. This is a loco shed in Lithgow, note the mis-matched window

Then another shot of the same building, with a stanchion passing between the wall and the gutter

Hard to see in the photos, but the windows aren't exactly lined up.
Cheers
Tony

 

One for the ultra-modern modeller.
Grease pots are used extensively in the Blue Mountains due to the tight curves. Not a recommended practice for modelling but a detail still to have with suitably weathered ballast to represent the spread of the grease along the track. The modern practice up here, which caught me by surprise is to paint them hi-vis orange, this has the effect of making them look like a person from a distance, as anyone who works next to the rail in NSW must wear orange hi-vis with a cross on the back.
Apparently the reason for this is that the rail-grinders when coming along would not see the grease pots and take them out, causing all sorts of havoc, so they painted them orange.

One thing for the detail fiend, maybe it's the next thing, is the smell!!!
The smell of the grease in the air is quite palpable, but I have never seen this on the the layout of some "ultra realism" person.
Cheers
Tony

 

Hi Gary,
In NSW most hi-railers are limited to 30km/h unless they are fitted with an extra (read expensive) brake system in addition to the normal set-up. This allows the hi-railer to travel at 40km/h! As a result, very few hi-railers are fitted with this as it is not cost effective at all. Being limited like this we sometimes had to sit and wait in a refuge until an overtaking train had passed us.
We had a TO (Traffic Officer) in the car with us. He was in constant communication with all the signal boxes on the route. This was normally done by mobile phone. In the 10 tunnels section there is no mobile coverage (still) so NSW Trains have had to build their own radio network. This is the Digital Network Radio or DTRS that was built for the whole network recently. This basically uses handsets much like a standard phone, and you can easily dial any number in the NSW Train network like box landlines. You can dial numbers outside the network too, but you get a recorded American voice saying that all outside calls are monitored. The whole system does not work if you physically take the phone a certain distance away from the rail corridor. Funnily enough the phone had on its home screen a picture of the ex-Danish MZ class loco which were imported second hand into Australia, the one that looks like a corrugated shed on bogies, we would have expected something closer to home, like an XPT (really a British HST) or a NR class loco.
Our TO was an ex loco driver who used to drive the 46 class electrics up the mountains a lot, so his route knowledge was second to none. He had lots of good stories. He drove lots of loco types but his favourite was the 46.
Our hi-railer was insulated so it didn't trigger any of the track circuits, so we needed the signal box to block that section for us. There is a lot of terminology and some of it I missed, I had a job to do too.
Cheers
Tony

 

How wires connect to the track in real life.

This was just on the down-side of Lithgow station, where we had to stop for a while to let a train do some shunting, so I had plenty of time to wander around and find things of interest.
Attached to the outside like this is the easiest way to solder wires to HO track, rather than underneath, and it is prototypical too!

 

Then there's what to do with the wires when they have to disappear under the board. You could knock up some junction boxes like this.

Is just one thing to do with them.

 

A rather sad looking set of buffers in the Down yard at Mt Victoria. The rails leading to this buffer are dated from the early 1900s, they are still in use but don't see much traffic, either hi-railers like ours which don't put much load or wear on the rails or track machines might get stabled there.

Note the rather ubiquitous O-bike in the background (dockless share bike), they get everywhere.
Cheers
Tony

 

Now we have started looking at the data after getting it all processed, quite a business when working on 2 different datums, neither particularly relatable to the other, but that's not a story for here...
Some pretty pictures to start with. We have the twin head scanner which returns a signal from each point it sees in 3D space, and each point has its own X,Y,Z coordinate. This comes back with intensity of reflection reading as well, steel reflects differently to concrete, asphalt, paint etc. We also took photos with a 360 degree spherical camera at the same time. When we sync the images up with the point cloud, all done with the help of the very accurate GPS time, we can assign a colour to each of those points. Not really useful technically, but does make for pretty pictures. There are some things that don't colour well, as they give funny reflectance values or they gave a funny exposure in the photo. The overhead wires here are a bit chunky as a result of this.

This is of Lithgow yard
And we can manipulate the view around to get a drone or helicopter style view, all without leaving the ground

This might be somewhere near Zig Zag.
Cheers
Tony

 

For me, one of the most significant things about the Blue Mountains line is the electric stanchions, most have been there far longer than me. This was the first non-metropolitan electrification in NSW, and it went over significant grades, which posed electrical challenging for climbing locos and for descending locos with regenerative braking. It was the 1950s and NSW was still mostly steam powered, with some dabbling in diesel power. A lot of the structures were very elaborate with significant lattice work. This was to provide either support for wire ends, for long spans, or for single sided structures in tight curvature areas. Subsequent electrification for long distance was nowhere near as elaborate, namely the stretch near me from Hornsby to Gosford, which was done later.
The structures and their colours are something I want to incorporate into a future layout (which is coming together in my head rather quickly now, it may even get a start this year, but that's another story).
These structures currently have a beautiful patina of weathered steel, some would call it rust, but it may not be for to much longer, most of these structures are deemed "life expired" and are destined to be replaced in the not too distant future.
In the meantime, I have taken some cross sections from the data during lunch and stuck some dimensions on the diagrams. If these are printed out keeping the aspect ratio constant, they should be able to be scaled. I have white background versions if anyone would like to save printer ink, the black versions look better.
The sheer variety of structures here is staggering, of the old style portals there are at least 12 types, plus for some of the collieries going off, which no longer exist, they had wooden poles with tension wires between them for support.
Here are some of the types that I have currently saved.

Plain type but with a-frame lattice on one side for end of line support.

And then the single sided lattice portal. These are quite rare, only saw them in the stretch from Oaky Park to Zig Zag (near Lithgow) and up near Blackheath. I was quite taken with them, so pulled them out earlier.

The eventual plan is to build my own structures.
Cheers
Tony

 

Wasn't really thinking of going into production with them, a lot of layouts around with overheads use the same one over and over. Yes, it can be the case in the modern systems, but really only the ultra modern ones have all the same stanchions, real life has quite a variety, and this is sadly lacking in the model world.
Not sure whether a 3D printed one would have enough strength, I'm thinking brass might be the way to go, just need to find brass I and H beams, I'm sure they exist somewhere.
As time allows I will be pulling sections of of most of the older types, plus more modern ones if someone wants one.
In the meantime we have been fooling around with pretty coloured pictures of point cloud, first the VL class that was sitting at Eskbank

Then in iso view with the shed, note another type of overhead structure, note this last picture we have made the background artificially blue.

Cheers
Tony

 

I am quite keen to do the overheads, the variety and complexity will be a good challenge. But most of all, these guys would just look silly getting about without any wires.

Cheers
Tony