Despite the best care taken to stamp mileposts accurately, you will find that the curve boundaries, which show up clearly in wear and geometry charts, are often slightly misaligned from run to run. Or they may be well aligned with one another, but poorly aligned to the track profile showing curves and tangent sections in the Track Segment database table.
Rangecam uses the Track Segment table to define curve boundaries for the purpose of calculating average measurements and wear rates. If the boundaries are incorrect, the wear rates will be incorrect. For rail replacement forecasting, it is especially critical to ensure that the Track Segment start and end locations are right. Any errors in the Track Segment table should be corrected.
If you have track geometry runs, you can use them to calculate track segments. If this is done after all location corrections for the geometry run, the segments will be automatically aligned with the foot-by-foot curvature data.
Track geometry runs may need to be aligned to rail profiling runs if they were not collected using a common odometer.
When the track segment boundaries are correct, you should shift profile locations so that the curve boundaries that appear in the run data are correctly aligned to the track segments, and to other runs. Since the correspondence between increased wear and curve boundaries is not exact (wear may 'spread' from the curve into adjoining spirals and tangent), the best approach may be to align wear transition zones from each run to those of an earlier run. Rangecam provides a visual interface for shifting run locations. Beside manual alignment techniques, Rangecam includes tools for automatic run alignment.