Measuring the height and stagger of a contact wire
In an OLE system, the catenary runs in a predefined path above the track in order to guarantee good electrical contact with the pantograph as well as minimize wearing.
This is usually implemented at the design phase by establishing the location of the contact wire at each registration arm (pole/mast), in other words, its height (over the top of rail plane) and stagger (the zig-zag distance from the track axis).
Those geometrical parameters must be checked before commissioning and during maintenance operations to verify that they meet the specifications.
Basic Workflow
Measuring the contact wire and stagger with the tCat is straightforward.
- Locate the tCat trolley at the desired spot (ie: a pole/mast, the midspan…)
- Click on “measure”
- After a couple of seconds, the system will automatically provide with the contact wire height and stagger in both an schematic view and in table format, along with other parameters such as the stationing, track gauge and cant at that location
- Should you want to find and record the location of a different wire, you just need to click on the desired point from the point cloud visor
Benefits from using tCat
As you can see this procedure involves very little human intervention (basically locating the trolley at the desired spot), reducing human – prone errors in using a measurement device and in recording and typing the information captured in the field (typos) and increasing the speed of the overall process.
The recorded data can be exported to different formats like .csv and excel.
