INTERVIEW
‘The cost of not doing so is higher, but it often appears later and is harder to attribute directly.’ SSH: Trimble is a huge multinational company, and yet within the rail industry specifically, recognition of the brand is perhaps not as widespread as it is in other sectors. Is that something you have found, and has it been a challenge? SL: It is very much an industry vertical. Trimble originated in the GNSS space. We produced some of the first commercial GPS receivers back in the early 1980s, and within that world, among professional land surveyors, the name is well known. But if you asked someone at random at an exhibition like InnoTrans, with its four thousand-plus exhibitors, whether they knew who Trimble was, they most likely would not. Where we do have strong recognition is among the people actually building and maintaining railway tracks. We started by addressing survey professionals within the rail industry, helping them measure track precisely, and from there we expanded our footprint into rail construction companies. Within those organisations there are users who know us well because they use our solutions to position, build, and maintain track. But it is not the kind of name recognition you have across an entire organisation. The process of becoming established in a given market takes time. In Germany, it started more than thirty years ago, when solutions were needed to build the first high-speed rail infrastructure. You work closely with the construction companies, with the track owners, with the network operators. Deutsche Bahn in Germany and Network Rail in the UK are examples. And you go through lengthy technology approval processes to bring new methods into their workflows. Large organisations have regulatory requirements, and some of those requirements are still being developed as the technology evolves. It is all very timeconsuming. But at a certain point you have the approvals, the key players understand how the technology works, and then you see it spreading. That process also varies considerably by region. In the United States, for instance, I worked in the Americas for a number of years, and the standards governing measurement technology in the railway sector are quite different from those used in Europe. In the US you have large Class 1 freight organisations maintaining tens of thousands of miles of track, and the approach to infrastructure maintenance is entirely different from what you see in a
passenger-focused network, or in a mixeduse system like Germany's, where freight and passenger traffic largely share the same tracks. Those different maintenance philosophies shape which technologies become standard, and at what pace. SSH: In terms of the UK specifically, the variation in standards between the UK and Europe is not as extreme as between Europe and the US. From your perspective working with construction companies here, what are those conversations like? SL: One thing that has always surprised me in the US context is the approach to clearance validation. When you build or change railway infrastructure, you always need to prove that clearances are sufficient, that train traffic can pass safely without touching anything. In other markets I have worked in, a final clearance documentation step is a standard requirement before a line goes into operation. You have to demonstrate that nothing reaches into the clearance envelope of a train. That has not always been a requirement I have encountered here, which I find striking. You build something, you install it, and in some cases that validation step is simply not required before it enters service. SSH: How does a rail operator or contractor know when their survey and measurement approach is costing them more than it should? SL: The most direct indicator is the amount of time and labour involved. But I would approach this question from two directions. On one side, if you are using traditional geodetic methods, a total station with a prism pole or a rail shoe, the work is highly labour-intensive. A surveyor with a pole in one hand, taking two measurements to capture a single track location and then moving five metres up the track to repeat the process: that can take many hours to cover five or six hundred metres.
There are still customers working that way, simply because they are not aware that a track measurement trolley exists, where you place the prism on the trolley, it measures gauge with a dedicated sensor and inclination with another, and the instrument follows the prism automatically, recording a coordinate every metre or so. With a trolley and a total station, you can cover five to six hundred metres per hour. With a trolley combined with an inertial measurement unit, you can do two and a half kilometres in an hour or more. On the other side of the equation, if you are not investing in track geometry measurement at all, if you are not even aware that it matters, you accumulate track quality problems that become very costly to fix later. And there is an ongoing maintenance dimension too: control points can be disturbed by construction activity, damaged by accident, or simply disappear when asphalt is replaced. That ongoing cost of maintaining the reference network has to be factored in. The cost of not doing so is higher, but it often appears later and is harder to attribute directly. In terms of how new this technology is: the motorised optical instruments have been around since the early 1990s. The first trolley systems were developed in the late 1990s and trolleys capable of higher productivity followed in 2006. The integration of inertial measurement technology into the track measurement process, which is what enables the highest productivity levels, is more recent still, and represents the most significant step change in what is achievable. SSH: And the track access window is a major factor here too, is it not? Absolutely. Consider the London Underground, which operates for around twenty to twenty-one hours a day. You cannot simply decide you would like to carry out an as-built survey of a section of track. There is extensive planning involved, and you might be allocated a two-hour window
Application: Highly productive track survey with GEDO IMS System and GEDO Profiler.
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