Ramboll specialists were commissioned to undertake detailed laser scanning surveys of 52 of the 53 stations on the Piccadilly Line, one of London Underground’s major arteries.
The data produced will assist London Underground (LU) in determining the extent of any alterations and improvements which may be required to the station platforms, as part of its Deep Tube Upgrade Programme – a programme conceived to improve capacity and reliability across the network. Both the platform areas and cross passages were scanned.
Our work had to be carried out during night-time engineering hours. It also had to adhere to tight deadlines to avoid any potential disruption on the Piccadilly Line, and was programmed to avoid working during the 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games. The site data collection programme allowed for 7-days-a-week continuous working, with stations surveyed according to priority phases determined by Transport for London (TfL).
All the surveys were undertaken using the London Survey Grid (LSG) to enable integration with existing data sets; LSG is the standard coordinate system adopted by LU and Crossrail. This necessitated using survey control points within tunnels when these were no longer available on station platforms. A trolley based survey system was used to measure the position of platform edges and the running rails to accurately describe their relative positions.
The results of our surveys have been supplied as registered point cloud data (a record of the millions of measurements taken at each station) which can be used for different applications such as producing drawings and 3D models. We also provided greyscale TruView measurable web enabled 360º images as well as CAD files which confirm the precise alignment of the platform edges and running rails.