Gis On The Qinghai - Tibet Railway

Weary pilgrims, attending the Sunning of the Buddhasupport the emergency response planning and rescue
Festival in the Chinese city of Xining (the capital ofsystem.
Qinghai Province), board the Qinghai-Tibet train forThe control system needed to keep railway
the 26-hour trip home to Lhasa, capital of Tibetdowntime to the bare minimum, monitor equipment,
Province.minimise maintenance needs, and provide detailed
Whilst asleep, the train will be supervised by therecords of environmental conditions along the track.
railway’s control centre, which displays real-timeConsultant ESRI China (Beijing) Ltd. used its software
information on the train’s location, speed, oxygento bring all this data together and display it on maps
levels, and electrical system.in the control centre. The State Key Laboratory of
The control centre is a partnership betweenRail Traffic Control and Safety, at Beijing Jiaotong
Qinghai-Tibet Railway Bureau and the State KeyUniversity, and the Qinghai-Tibet Railway Bureau
Laboratory of Rail Traffic Control and Safety, atjointly developed the web-enabled enterprise GIS.
Beijing Jiaotong University. Together, they haveThe main source of data is CAD design data and
developed a monitoring system for railway operationsatellite imagery of the surrounding landscape. The
and safety for the Tibetan line.Laboratory collaborated with Leador CO., LTD for a
Close monitoring is critical as the train ascends fromvisual record of the track and landscape, including
Xining (2,275 metre) to cross a remote Himalayanlocation coordinates for the images.
plateau at 4000 metre altitude, before reaching theirLeador (a company in WuHan specialising in mobile
destination 1900 kilometers away.mapping and survey software) used a survey vehicle
When the railway section between Golumd (theequipped with camcorder, camera, GPS, and digital
second largest city of Qinghai province) and Lhasacompass to record data.
opened in July, it set numerous worldwide engineeringExtra data comes from a digital elevation model, 3DS
records.Model, and databases created in the ArcGlobe
Over 960 km of track runs at extreme altitudes, halfenvironment.
of it running across permafrost; the world’sTo resolve high altitude communication and data
highest rail track crosses over Tanggula Pass at 5072transmission challenges, a GSM-R cellular phone
metres. Costing US $4.2 billion, the railway holds thesystem was given by Nortel Network and Beijing
world record for the highest rail tunnel and stationXidian and is used to transmit real-time location of
and has 675 bridges.moving trains to the control centre.
To protect against altitude sickness, passenger carsThe command centre fuses real-time monitor
are pressurised and have supplemental oxygeninformation such as the location and speed of the
systems; passengers have to sign a healthtrain, amount of staff and passengers, temperature
registration agreement before boarding the train.and pressure of the air inside passenger cars, and the
Even the train’s diesel motor locomotives areelectrical system (voltage, current) and
exclusively designed to function at high altitudes. Adisplays it on digital maps.
year since the Qinghai-Tibet Railway opened, it hasClimate conditions and images along the route are
carried 11 million tons of freight and 2.02 millionalso retrievable. Operators can focus on sections of
passengers, with few incidents.the track to a predetermined resolution. Message
During the railway’s construction, planningalert icons show on the map with the location of any
engineers were required to design a control centre toproblems, pointing to the relevant data. Users can
receive and display data from various monitoringbrowse maps; query and display infrastructure
devices, combining them with data from thefeatures by location; recover geographic data,
railway’s Microsoft and Oracle databases.photographs, and video; and manage and search for
They also needed to display photographs and satellitemetadata.
images of the landscape surrounding the tracks to