RITES wins BE Award

BANGALORE: RITES Ltd, consultant in the fields of transport, infrastructure, and related technologies, has won BE Award for its detailed engineering study for the Kashmir Railway project in the state of Jammu and Kashmir.

The BE awards of Excellence, instituted under the category 'Civil: Rail Design' is judged by an independent panel of industry experts. The award was presented at a ceremony held during the annual BE Conference (www.be.org), honouring the extraordinary work of Bentley users improving the world's infrastructure.

The $2.5 billion Kashmir Railway project will connect the state of Jammu and Kashmir with the Indian Railway and provide an important link to the rest of India.

Among the project routes, the construction of 142-kilometer stretch of rugged and mountainous terrain is a real challenge, which requires the construction of 118 bridges and 65 tunnels.

By helping RITES in developing/constructing alternative routes, establish their feasibility, and optimize them, Bentley MXRAIL and its 3D visualizations have saved millions of dollars in construction costs as well as substantial time. For example, on one 12-kilometer section of railway, Bentley MXRAIL saved almost $13 million and also cut short the construction time by six months.

Speaking on this RITES, chief project manager, Track and Survey, A Jha said "Our use of Bentley MXRAIL enabled an integrated approach to this complex project, with a single database, managing various stages of project development. Besides, it has also facilitated collaborative work across disciplines, including track design, geology, and geo-technology as well as bridge and tunnel designs, and helped us quickly develop and examine alternative proposals before recommending the best alternative for adoption. In one instance, the software was able to triangulate a model containing more than eight million points and more than 13.5 million triangles in one go."

The design process started with digitization of topography and elevation details from available maps. A tentative alignment with designed alternatives to freeze the corridor for detailed study. Aerial photography, followed by photogrammetric study, was conducted for the frozen corridor, and the data generated from this process was used for the detailed design of alignment.

CIOL Bureau