Add stationing to routes from text file?

[TarickAbu-Aly]

Morning all,

I have a fairly complicated linear referencing task that I am trying to tackle with Arc and so far it is stumping me. Basically I have several river alignments that I have converted into routes. Some are short, while others are very long (~100 miles). Separately I have a text file with water surface elevation along each of the river alignments at some arbitrary river mile stationing. The text file stationing does not line up in any way with the vertices of the river alignments (which were exported from CAD).

What I am trying to do is somehow create station points at each of the river miles listed in the text file along each alignment in GIS. The goal being to assign water surface elevation to those nodes. The problem would be so much simpler if I had XY locations for each of the water surface elevation points, but unfortunately all I have is stationing relative to each river alignment.

Any thoughts or ideas?

Edit: Using ArcGIS 9.3 and have licensed version of ET Geowizards

Thanks!

[JonathanQuinn]

Do your river stations have measurement values for where they fall on the stream, and do you have some sort of stream ID field in both the river features and text file?  If so, it sounds as if you can just create routes from your river features and then use the Locate Features Along Routes tool to create station points that fall on the river features.

If that's not possible can you provide a sample of your data?

[TarickAbu-Aly]

The problem with locating the features along the routes is that there is no XY location data in the text file, so I can't make a shapefile out the information. The only relation the text file has to the alignments is that it gives the river mile stationing of each point along a reach. I have attached an example shapefile and text file.

Thanks

[JonathanQuinn · Accepted solution]

You don't need XY information in the text file; the equivalent of the XY information would be the route ID to determine which stream the station is located on and the distance along the specific route that the station falls on.  That information represents the geographic location of the points.  It looks like the RM values are the length along the river that the stations are at and the WSE values are the elevation?

Here are some steps you can follow to create points from your data:
1)  Create two fields: a From_Field and To_Field
2)  Since your text file has route measurements in miles, calculate a 0 for the From_Field and use the Calculate Geometry function and calculate the length of the route in Miles for the To_Field.
3)  Use the Create Routes tool to create a route using the Reach as the Route Identifier field, the Two_Fields as the Measure Source and specify the From and To Measure fields accordingly.
4)  The output should automatically be added to the map, so right click on your Excel file in ArcMap and go to Display Route Events.
5)  Make sure the Route Reference is set to your new route layer, the Route Identifier is Reach for the first section.
6)  Set the Route Identifier in the second section to Reach.
7)  Leave the type of events to point and set the Measure to the RM field.

The output is a feature layer, so it doesn't reside anywhere on disk.  Right click and export it to a shapefile to save it.

[TarickAbu-Aly]

Thanks for your help, that solves my problem! I followed your step-by-step procedure and it worked perfectly. Thanks again!