The Dirt

Rail Design and Civil 3D

I spent last week in Seoul, Korea.  I was invited here to give Civil 3D presentations to our partners and to about 100 customers who were specifically interested in rail design.

The rail presentation had me quite concerned—you see, I have no rail design experience. Nevertheless, after a fair amount of research into the subject, I quickly learned that Civil 3D is in fact a very good field- to-finish solution for rail. My assumption that the rail industry has survey and GIS requirements proved to be correct.

I learned that we have several rail customers in Europe and Asia who are either in the process of integrating Civil 3D into their processes or have been using Civil 3D for quite some time. I hope to be able to tell you about these customers very soon . . . one of them has 1.2 million employees!

These customers’ have designs that include high-speed railways. The horizontal and vertical requirements for track design are really fascinating. Curve radii, superelevation, cant, bridge, and tunnel requirements for a several-thousand-ton train that goes in excess of 150 mph are quite unique.

It was my pleasure to step outside of the road design box that I have been working in for so long—if only for a short while—to learn more about high-speed rail with the people of Korea.

The Grand Canyon Skywalk

Here is another example of engineering wizardry. The Grand Canyon Skywalk opened a few months ago at the Grand Canyon here in my home state of Arizona, and it’s been booked solid ever since. Not for the faint of heart or for those who don’t like heights, the skywalk takes you seventy feet past the canyon edge on a platform made of glass. The structure is ¾ of a mile above the Colorado River.

An article featuring the Skywalk’s design and construction is in the July issue of PE Magazine.

Standing Section

I’m not kidding, this is real. Airlines are considering a standing section. I need to rant . . .

As many of you know I travel a lot. I have flown over 100,000 miles on multiple airlines for the last ten years or so. From this long experience I have made many observations that I have condensed into the following guidelines for my fellow travelers.

• If your luggage consists of a backpack, PLEASE take it off your back and carry it in front of you when you board the aircraft. I already have enough bumps and scars on my head.
• If your luggage consists of 16-gallon trash bags, you need to buy a suitcase!
• If you insist on travelling with your children, DO NOT assume that others find your offspring cute, adorable, etc. Consider teaching them the meaning of the word NO before travelling.
• If you are travelling with an infant who cries/screams continually, put your trash bags to good use and give one to the child to sleep in (or) try putting bourbon in the baby’s formula (or) both.
• Boeing and Airbus engineers are undoubtedly all elves, so if you are taller than 4 feet expect to be uncomfortable, cramped, and don’t even think about having enough room to open your laptop to work.
• If you snore and sit next to me, expect to have something spilled on you while you are asleep.
• If you are afraid to fly, worry about jet lag, or can’t sleep on airplanes, consider Xanax.
• If a backpack-wearing, snoring mother with a screaming baby, undisciplined toddlers, and trash bags for luggage boards your plane—wash down all the Xanax you have with bourbon, lock the kids in the overheads, and hit mom over the head with the laptop you can’t open.

Of course, I’m kidding. Truly.

Great Manmade River (GMR) Water Supply Project, Libya

Libya’s GMR project, the world's largest engineering venture, will transport water from aquifers beneath the Sahara, and convey it along a network of huge underground pipes to the northern coastal belt, “to provide for the country's 5.6 million inhabitants and for irrigation. Intended to be the showpiece of the Libyan revolution, Colonel Moammar Gaddafi called it, ‘The eighth wonder of the world.’"
It has been a while since I came across a civil engineering project of this magnitude! Check out the whole story HERE.

I am so impressed by the scale of this project and others that are either planned or underway in Libya that I hope to attend the Projex Libya Conference in Tripoli this December. Stay tuned!

CE News Article about the Integration of CAD and GIS

The July 2007 issue of CE News includes my article about Stanley Consultant’s integration of CAD and GIS. The article talks about the use of Autodesk MapGuide as a project management solution for civil engineering firms and the reasons why firms should adopt a cyclic design/build process.

The article can be found at http://www.cenews.com/article.asp?id=1923

Allocating more memory for Civil 3D on Windows XP and Windows Server 2003

Inspired by my tip last week about the STATUS command, Louis Morasse sent me a good tip about a switch option that you can add to the Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 boot.ini files to allocate more memory for Civil 3D. If you’re using Windows XP with more than 2GB RAM, you might want to try using the /3GB switch.

According to the Windows support page “Available switch options for the Windows XP and the Windows Server 2003 Boot.ini files”:

“This switch forces x86-based systems to allocate 3 GB of virtual address space to programs and 1 GB to the kernel and to executive components. A program must be designed to take advantage of the additional memory address space. With this switch, user mode programs can access 3 GB of memory instead of the usual 2 GB that Windows allocates to user mode programs. The switch moves the starting point of kernel memory to 3 GB. Some configurations of Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 and Microsoft Windows Server 2003 may require this switch.”

To learn more, go to:  http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;833721
You might want to explore the /maxmem=number switch too.