Latest Contributions by JimBarry

The availability of a practical and up-to-date data model template, tailored to the unique needs of an industry, is one of the keys to a successful GIS implementation, whether one’s use of Esri software is new or long-standing. For this reason, Esri collaborates with industry and academic leaders to continually evolve a range of geodatabase data model templates. The intent of Esri data model templates is to provide users with a best practice, industry-specific starting point. Most users start with these data model templates; then they refine and extend them to meet their specific needs and requirements. Esri data model templates work with the ArcGIS platform and reflect Esri’s view of best data model practice.     The ArcGIS Railroads Data Model is a geodatabase data model template for organizations that operate in the railroad industry, or in industries that operate with railroad-based operations and assets. It is a moderately normalized data model, intended to digitally represent physical and non-physical aspects of railroad operations.   Esri thanks all those professionals and organizations who contributed their time and talents to the creation and improvement of the ArcGIS Railroads Data Model for the good of the community and of all Esri users in the Railroad industries. Click here to DOWNLOAD the data model and all supporting materials.   Goal of the ArcGIS Railroads Data Model The goal of the ArcGIS Railroads Data Model is to make it easier, quicker, and more cost-effective for Railroad organizations to implement the ArcGIS system. The Esri provided data model template accomplishes this by freely providing a data model that takes full advantage of the capabilities of the geodatabase. The data model is created and tested with ArcGIS products to ensure that it works. This significantly reduces the complexity, time, and cost to implement a spatially enabled Railroads data repository. Keeping up with the advancements of the geodatabase is an ongoing activity. Esri software development staff continue to enhance and evolve the capabilities of the geodatabase. In addition to the data model representing a best practice on how to leverage the geodatabase, the data model also represents a repository of industry knowledge. Much of the structure and content of this data model is based on feedback from Esri’s users as well as lessons learned from the large number of implementations of ArcGIS in the railroads industries. Because the ArcGIS Railroads Data Model is built specifically for the ArcGIS family of products, it can be implemented as-is, without modification to ArcGIS products.   Audience At this 2024 edition of the data model, the primary target audience are freight railroad organizations across North America. Passenger rail organizations in North America, as well as all kinds of rail organizations in the world outside of North America have many significant differences in their assets, operations, as well as requirements and constraints that are specific to different countries and regions. That isn’t to say that for those other organizations this data model would be useless. These other kinds of rail organizations may find valuable use from this data model as a starting point, or as a resource for enhancing their own database design. It is simply important to recognize that for organizations other than North American railroads, this version of the data model has not comprehensively considered their needs. We welcome partners and other organizations would would like to collaborate with Esri for improving and extending this data model further, to broaded its scope for future versions.   Design Considerations The ArcGIS Railroads Data Model has two sets of design considerations: 1. INDUSTRY COMPATIBILITY -- This data model needs to be fully compatible with other industry standard data models that already exist and are in productive use across the railroad industry. This is important for both interoperability purposes as well as making data exchange and translation easier. To that end, this Esri Railroad Data Model includes elements of, and is fully compatible with: a. North American Rail Network (NARN) database model: Maintained and published by the US Department of Transportation’s Federal Railroad Administration. b. Positive Train Control (PTC) database model: This is a set of technologies implemented to prevent some of the most major human-error incidents such as train-to-train collisions, over-speed derailments, incursions into established work zone limits, and the movement of trains thru a mainline switch left in the wrong position. PTC accomplishes these objectives in part with a database model for storing and updating data (including spatial data) in a standard and useful way. This database model is also governed by the US Department of Transportation’s Federal Railroad Administration. c. Rail Industry Geographic Information System (RIGIS™) database model: Maintained and published by Railinc, which is a wholly owned, for-profit subsidiary of the Association of American Railroads (AAR). Railinc is a resource for technology solutions used by railroads across North America. RIGIS™ is the data model used by these railroads when sharing data with other railroads or updating their data with Railinc/AAR to support a wide variety of collective uses. 2. GIS CAPABILITIES -- The ArcGIS Railroads Data Model needs to contain design elements that allow railroad data to fully exploit the capabilities of the ArcGIS system, to include: a. Linear Referencing--specifically using ArcGIS Location Referencing tools. b. Network datasets--for solving best paths, service areas, and other network analysis capabilities. c. Trace Networks--for topological validation and all types of network tracing functions. d. Network Diagrams--for schematic mapping, and supporting track chart creation and update. e. Straight-Line Diagrams--for mapping point and span data of assets and phenomena. f. Field Mobility--for asset inspection, incident reporting, maintenance of way operations, and more. g. Real-Time mapping--of vehicles, personnel, and stationary sensors. h. Parcel maintenance--as a base for managing real estate property, structures, and other assets. i. Artificial Intelligence--for building and using deep learning models for automating data collection.  Please feel free to let us know below if you have any questions or comments about this. Thanks! ... View more

ArcGIS Roads and Highways is a location referencing data management system, which, as its name implies is most often used for mapping vehicular traffic and linear assets related to roads and highways. In this article, we introduce how you can use ArcGIS Roads and Highways with railroad data.  ArcGIS Location Referencing is also the toolset underpinning the ArcGIS Pipeline Referencing product, so it is quite possible to use this toolset to map many different types of linear assets and phenomena. In this article, we will describe how you can load your railroad data into this linear referencing system for managing frequently changing layers of information as point events and line events, in a way that is fully time-enabled.  This document here provides a step-by-step set of tasks for loading your data into this system. For starters, you will need ArcGIS Enterprise for Windows, with the ArcGIS Roads and Highways server extension, along with a web server for hosting the Event Editor web application. The user who follows these steps will need to be at least a Creator role on your enterprise portal, with the ability to create and edit enterprise geodatabases. The attached document is a work in progress, and the steps may not be airtight for anyone's particular system. I would like to continue making the document better, so feedback is welcome, either in the comment thread below, or by emailing me (Jim Barry) directly at jbarry@esri.com. ... View more

  geographic and schematic rail map When you have railroad data, it's often not only important to maintain your GIS data in geographic space but it's also important to be able to display your data in a schematic diagram. Many railroad organizations maintain their geographic data in a GIS separate from the tools and database they use for their schematic maps and track charts, with different editing processes and tempos. It's very easy to get them out of date and out of sync. In order to create a schematic view that makes sense and is intuitive to your users, it takes a bit of editing to your data to add the network attributes to tell the schematic diagram tools how these tracks relate to one another. Here is a section of my railroad that I want to create a schematic map for. Here in this Feature Dataset are layers for my railroad track lines and my switch devices for controlling the flow of trains thru the system. Before we can diagram our network, we need to build a trace network. Here I'm going to be using the new Trace Network tools that are included in ArcGIS Pro. It used to be if you wanted to create schematic diagram maps, you needed to use ArcGIS Utility Network or ArcGIS Schematics. But starting with version 2.6 back in 2020, you get this new "Trace Network Tools" toolbox. With this, not only can I perform some basic routing, tracing, and flow operations, but I can also use diagram tools for generating my schematic map. This toolbox here has everything I need. Before I can go too far, I need to create Network Attributes that represent the hierarchy of tracks when we get into areas that are a bit more complicated, like spurs, loops, turnouts, yards, and such. At a minimum, I need point and polyline feature classes. To start small, I'm using a polyline feature class of track, and a point feature class of track switches. Trace network needs these two feature classes to be in a Feature Dataset, and from there you can use the Create Trace Network tool. When you drag the new Trace Network into the map, you get a few trace network editing layers to help you find and resolve topology errors. So I select the tracks I want to diagram, selected here in teal. Then once your topology errors are resolved, and the topology is clean, you can create a new diagram. Then when that is built, you can apply a diagram template to it The Apply Relative Mainline Diagram tool is specifically designed for railroads, once that's applied, then you end up with a diagram that looks... ...like this. Because we did a decent job with the network attributes, we ended up with a schematic that is clean and intuitively useful. Of course the Y-axis is blown up a bit to make things clear, it is important to note that the X-axis, both the track and the position of the switches are all to scale. Keeping the x-axis to scale can be important if you want to export your diagram to your Track Chart editing workflow, since track charts typically want to keep the x-axis distances to scale. Once I'm happy with the diagram, I can export it into its own regular feature classes and then apply the same calibration points to it, so that I can apply a Linear Location Referencing System to it just like the geographic data. If I want, I can even bring the schematic map into the same map. We have seen a few railroads that like to work with the geographic and schematic data side by side in the GIS like this. You don't have to do this, but it's an option if that's what you want. Here's another example of applying the same tools and techniques. This time on the LA Metro transit rail network. Same thing. We convert the rail and switches into a schematic, but we keep the x-axis to scale. If you would like to see a video walk-through of this process, check out this video here. ***2023-09-18: Here is a more up-to-date video with more detailed information. Let me know in the comments below if you have any questions or comments about this! Thanks! ... View more

We're Back! We at Esri are all pretty excited about this year's conference--back in person after 3 long years. We hope you are too! It's going to be great to meet up, discuss, and learn things in-person--not to mention spending a few days in and around San Diego.  Digital Access For those of your who are not able to attend, it's great that we've learned a lot of lessons over the past few years of virtual events, and will be offering Digital Access to a good bit of it. Rail Sessions and Activities UC22 Flyer   (printable PDF) Check out the flyer, linked above, for a quick glance guide of all of the activity planned for the Esri UC related to the use of ArcGIS by railroads. The flyer covers a bunch of tech sessions we think you'll like, as well as Sunday's Transportation Social and Wednesday morning's Rail SIG (special interest group) meeting!     ... View more

When you're at a hackathon, you tend to use the tools that you know. That way you can put all of your effort and time into the app you're trying to build, and not into having to learn a new tool that might set you back. But what if you want to use ArcGIS but don't have much experience with it? Well, here's a video that in just 30 minutes will give you everything you need to get going and get productive with ArcGIS Platform and ArcGIS Online for hosting data, making maps, using location services, and making apps. Even during a fast-paced hackathon you may find that spinning up on a few key skills could be a great investment when you see what kinds of capabilities you can bring to your project.  In this video, we cover all 10 of these topics: Who is Esri and What is ArcGIS? Sign up for a free ArcGIS Online for Developers account Search, find, import, create, and host map data on the cloud Make, style, and share a web map Use API Keys for activating content, location services, and interactive data analysis tools Create custom web mapping apps without code: StoryMaps, Dashboards, app builders and templates Create custom web mapping apps with code: REST API, JavaScript API, Runtime SDKs Use ArcGIS along with other commercial and open source mapping tools Data science with ArcGIS: ArcGIS Python packages Community tools and resources: online forums, open source projects Here is a link to the video: https://tiny.cc/ArcGISHacksVideo_v2 (edited 2022-01-07, to fix broken links) ... View more

EDITED 2021-10-19: This is an older version of this article.  There is a new article with new updated links here: https://community.esri.com/t5/developers-blog/hackathon-kickstarter-video-arcgis-platform-for/ba-p/1039359 ----- When you're at a hackathon, you tend to use the tools that you know. That way you can put all of your effort and time into the app you're trying to build, and not into having to learn a new tool that might set you back. But what if you want to use ArcGIS but don't have much experience with it? Well, here's a video that in just 30 minutes will give you everything you need to get going and get productive with ArcGIS Online for hosting data, making maps, and making apps. Even during a fast-paced hackathon you may find giving 24 minutes to see what these tools can do for you could be a great investment when you see what kinds of capabilities you can bring to your project.  In this video, we cover all 10 of these topics: Who is Esri and What is ArcGIS? Signing up for a free ArcGIS Online for Developers account Find, import, create, and host map data on the cloud Make and share a web map Style your map Using API Keys for activating content, location services, and interactive data analysis tools Create custom web mapping apps without code: StoryMaps, Dashboards, app builders and templates Creating custom web mapping apps with code: REST API, JavaScript API, Runtime SDKs Data science with ArcGIS: ArcGIS Python packages Community tools and resources: online forums, open source projects Here is a link to the video: https://tiny.cc/ArcGISHacksVideo (ed. on 2021-03-21 to update info and links) ... View more

Click this link, or click the image below, to go to the blog article. Thanks!! ... View more

Welcome Railroaders! We at Esri are all pretty excited about this year's virtual conference. We hope you are too! While we will all miss meeting up, discussing, and learning things in-person--not to mention spending a few days in and around San Diego--we hope a virtual conference will provide other advantages. To quote Gunny Highway "we improvise, we adapt, we overcome". We make it work. No different than how we all do business every day, right? Check out this Welcome Video from Mark Pescevic, Esri's Account Executive for Freight and Commuter Rail. Also, check out this FLYER for an "at a glance" view of all of the activity planned for the Esri UC related to the use of ArcGIS by railroads. click image For those who work for or around railroads, or are interested in how GIS is used to solve problems in rail transportation, we have a few videos for you to check out.  1) Improving safety when flagging-out track for maintenance     Check out this video. (alternate video link) Maintenance of Way (MOW) operations often require the “flag-out”, or temporary closing of track, so that the repair or inspection of track and equipment can be performed safely. MOW ops are inherently dangerous, and at the same time pull directly against service levels and revenue. When it comes to maintenance, normally you have a list of work to do, and you prioritize that list in order to do the most important things first. This sounds very reasonable. But in the case of rail maintenance, that cannot be the only criteria. It’s arguable that the location of the maintenance work is at least as important as its priority. For example, if a high priority task requires a section of track be flagged-out, there is value in finding other repair and inspection items in the area that also need work, even if those items are lower priority overall. Doing so, you can accomplish more work, in less amount of time, resulting in reduced track downtime, less revenue loss, fewer operational disruptions, and increased safety. 2) Synchronize geographic, schematic, and straight-line views of your maps Check out this video. (alternate video link) When it comes to railroad data, and keeping track of maintenance operations and the movement of rolling stock, sometimes a standard geographic map is best, but other times a schematic view showing relative position is best. And other kinds of actionable data is best viewed on straight-line diagrams. This demo shows how we can use Esri Roads and Highways web services along with rail data using a Linear Referencing System to keep these different views of your data in sync and interactive. 3) Use Artificial Intelligence to count and categorize train cars Check out this video. (alternate video link) When you look at a train, can you tell the difference between a locomotive and a boxcar? How about between a tank and a hopper? Ok, well how about between a gondola and a flat car hauling shipping containers? Of course you can! Well, do you know what else can? A properly trained deep learning model. Yes, you can use artificial intelligence technology to help handle tedious and repeatable tasks, so that you can put your mind on work that only your expertise can do. Video of trains passing by can be used to build a deep learning model, so that, given new video, the number of train cars, and their types (locomotive, box, container, tank, etc.) can be displayed on a map and dashboard, and stored in a database for analysis and reporting over time. This solution uses the arcgis.learn module of the ArcGIS API for Python, as well as ArcGIS Dashboards. ArcGIS is a System of Engagement for Railroad Operations To bring it all together, in this video, Keith King and Jim Barry from Esri's Transportation Team describe and demonstrate ArcGIS as a System of Engagement for Railroads. With ArcGIS, you can manage, analyze, and visualize your data across the organization, in order to have always up-to-date operational spatial awareness, to make the best decisions for maximizing efficiency and safety. ... View more