Track building guides?

[Jpl]

Do you know any possible ways to have some kind of "guide mark" on the point where track should go? This would help track building very greatly as you could actually see where you want to go next.

I know exact wgs-84 coordinates of points where turnouts are, slopes and curves start and also the height of the point (in meters over sea-level).

[Carsten Hölscher]

Do you know Transdem and the Ziegler-Tools? I think they should be able to do this job.

Carsten

[Jpl]

Yes, I know... I haven't found yet anything to achieve this.

[Jpl]

Hmm... now I find that "Streckenkonverter" will do it. Some documentation in english would be good for now...

[Roland Ziegler]

AFAIK, Oliver has written some basic tutorials for the initial steps with TransDEM, and I have also scribbled something for this "series". Possibly this could help, but I'm not sure.

Do you have some sort of map or just singular coordinates? You could enter these coordinates as control points in TransDEM and draw lines between them. In order to do this you either need a bitmap map suitable for georeferencing or a DEM - SRTM will do.

[Carsten Hölscher]

I think Oliver Lamm has written an English tutorial...(???)

Carsten

[Oliver Lamm]

As everybody is mentioning me ...

I've written some very basic tutorials for the first approaches of track building in britain. They are far from beeing complete and - as it looks like - still not exact enough to help non german speakers to use the tools.

If anyone insists on having them I'll upload them on my website.

Oli

[Jpl]

I have an excel file containing points and heights. (in this format: Lat; lon; height; name)

I would like to look at tutorials. Less is more than nothing.

[Roland Ziegler]

A somewhat unconventional approach but could work - the basic steps:

Create one or more xyz files from your Excel sheet. xyz files are text files, each xyz group is one line. x is long, y is lat and z is elevation. Lat and long format should be decimal degrees, elevation in metres.

Download the SRTM DEM for your area. Open in TransDEM and crop to the region you need. You need a DEM as the footing for all further work with TransDEM.

Open an xyz file in TransDEM. Each xyz file will produce one polyline. Do the polylines resemble anything close to a railway line? If yes, then this will be your raw route.

[Jpl]

Yes, the points are on where the railway is. Thank you.

[Oliver Lamm]

I've uploaded the three parts I've done so far on my Homepage (downloads).

They are more or less written for the usage of british map systems, but the work within TransDEM and Absteckrechner is the same for all raw route editing.

Oli

[Jpl]

What I do if my map images are already in UTM projection?

[Roland Ziegler]

You set the coordinate system to UTM and proceed normally with georeferencing.