Kilometer Intelligence on a Railway Polyline

[offi24]

Hello,

I’ve been trying—so far without success—to add some intelligence to a polyline in ArcGIS. I have a polyline representing a railway line, with an attribute field that stores the line’s starting kilometer point. I also have a point layer with kilometer markers placed every 1,000 meters along the railway. I want to transfer this information onto the polyline so that, no matter where I click on the line, I can retrieve the exact kilometer value at that location—like in the screenshot.

Does someone has an idea how to proceed?

Thanks in advance and best regards

Eric

[RPGIS]

Hi @offi24,

Given the complexity of your question, the only things that I can recommend are as follows:

1. Create a copy of the polyline and edit the copied line by dividing it into equal distances or parts
2. Use/Create an attribute rule or arcade calculation to create points in another feature at set distances and then label those features.
3. Add fields for starting kilometer distances and label them so that the labels are positioned along the line at set distances.
4. Try linear referencing and seeing what tools may work best for you.

Despite those I don't think you will be able to click anywhere on a line and get the distance along that line unless you use linear referencing. 

[BobBooth1]

You want to look at the Create Routes tool.

https://pro.arcgis.com/en/pro-app/3.4/tool-reference/linear-referencing/create-routes.htm

See the help on Linear Referencing.

https://pro.arcgis.com/en/pro-app/latest/help/data/linear-referencing/introduction-to-linear-referen...

[AyanPalit]

@offi24 Thanks for the notes along with screenshot - helps in understanding the use case. 

The workflow is better handled through Linear Referencing (simple functions) and Roads and Highways  (advanced functions).

You can get started with the following references:

• Linear referencing datasets
• Railway lines may be modelled as Routes with the Start/End locations as Calibration Points or simply update measures on the vertices.
• You can retrieve the measure value using the Explore/Identify tool.
• How to choose between linear referencing and location referencing

The use case is discussed in the following posts:

Creating points at hatch intervals along LRS routes

Create Line segments from Point Locations referencing Linear feature