Track plan
A track plan is a plan of the railway tracks of a station of the railway . There are also track plans that show all the stations of a railway junction or a railway line section consisting of several stations in one plan. The term station plan also used for this is not clear, as it also includes plans of the public facilities of passenger stations. Strictly speaking, exact plans of sections of railway lines outside the stations are also track plans.
Track plans are usually made available by the railway infrastructure companies (EIU) to the users of the respective tracks, the railway companies, without discrimination.
Track plans are used by railway companies or engineers for the management of existing stations or for the planning , construction or conversion of new or existing stations and also in specialist scientific literature. For special purposes such as electrification or fire protection in train stations, track plans with a special representation of the corresponding facilities are used.
They are therefore both as-built documentation and templates for new track planning.
A distinction is made between the following types of track plans:
- Scale plans: in scales mostly 1: 2000 and larger, with a complete representation of the station including the number and usable length of each track, signal systems , position of the platforms , numbering of the switches , inclination ratios , etc.
- Distortion plan : mostly complete, true to scale in the lengths compared to the widths, but greatly shortened (example: lengths 1: 4000, widths 1: 2000) for the purpose of a clearer and easier to use display of the train stations in the original that are several times longer than they are wide
- Topologically distorted, mostly complete, but not to scale plan for the purpose of an even simpler representation, depending on the purpose, for example without platforms, signal systems or turnout numbers
- Schematic overview plan: usually only shows, not to scale, the continuous main tracks of a train station and its track harbors without a precise representation of each individual track contained therein.
Today, the basis for the true-to-scale representation of track plans is usually the photogrammetric evaluation of vertical aerial photographs .
Current, out-of-scale track plans are no longer subject to confidentiality in the DB Netz AG area, as they were before the railway privatization, but are accessible to third parties. Since DB Netz, like other infrastructure operators, markets tracks as service facilities to third parties and thereby wants to generate income, it also provides potential tenants with the necessary information. This includes schematic track plans as an elementary component, in which certain track properties can be identified.
In most countries, however, at least current official full track plans are generally kept secret from the public, and in some cases older or less detailed plans. The secrecy of track plans is handled particularly strictly in communist countries or countries with a military government. Via the station parts that can be viewed on site from the outside, for example from platforms, overpasses or hills, as well as the accessible geodata z. Details about the track and signal systems etc. of a train station, for example, of the state and municipal surveying offices, are therefore not available to the public. In so far as complete or partial track plans of actually existing train stations are required in the relevant specialist literature for the presentation of a technical issue, they are therefore usually reproduced without the location being given. In contrast, historical track plans are partially available to the public in archives .
literature
- Deutsche Bahn AG: Guideline 819 (planning LST systems) .
- Notes on graphic representations of railway construction. (PDF; 1.39 MB) Lecture notes from the Chair of Railway Engineering. Brandenburg University of Technology Cottbus-Senftenberg , August 14, 2019.
- gleisplaene.de - Information and examples of track plans for German railways
