History

The development of SnakeGrid project started in University College London (ULC) in February 2005 as an advisory project to major railway company Network Rail in connection with the development of the West Coast main line. SnakeGrid was developed to address the specific problem that Network Rail was facing in constructing rail lines covering hundreds of kilometres. To meet the required track accuracy of 20mm per kilometre, Network Rail was faced with defining overlapping 10km grids over a 645km construction project.

SnakeGrid was initially developed to be used on the west coast main line from London to Glasgow. In this first application, a grid was developed such that the deviation from unity of the scale factor on the 645 km track was within 11 parts per million at all points – even though the height of this route ranged from 0 m to 300 m above sea level.

In 2007 UCL Business plc provided Proof of Concept funds to allow a complete re-write of the code to be carried out which had the benefit of producing organised, systematic code resulting in faster software, allowing more flexibility in the design of the SnakeGrids and the inclusion of more information in the design of the Grid to speed up the design process. Currently SnakeGrid is at Version 4.

Following the success of this project, the software was adapted to be used anywhere. As can be seen in the map on the left, it has now been used to derive true scale grids for all of Network Rail's primary routes, as well as several others in Great Britain and elsewhere. Some of these are stand-alone independent grids – such as that developed for the Crossrail project, or for the work on the re-opening of the route from Edinburgh to the Borders. Others are part of interlocking systems – for example the grid developed for the London Paddington to Swansea route accommodates the direct route and the branch via Bath, and joins seamlessly at Reading to the grid developed for the route to Plymouth.

SnakeGrid is now available in form of various products e.g. SnakeGrid Transformer for Bentley MicroStation and bespoke SnakeGrid solutions for surveying equipments.

Further information on the use of SnakeGrid on railway routes in Great Britain, and the experiences of the engineers who have worked with it, can be found in the October 2008 edition of Aspects, the in-house magazine of Network Rail.