Page 472 - 360.revista de Alta Velocidad - Nº 6

Martín Cabo, Sergio. Mesa Santos, Luis Eduardo. Palacio Vijande, Iván.

Once these steps are completed, a variety of outcomes is obtained, although it would be more
accurate to call them “products”, which will be explained in the following chapter.

4. Outcomes

4.1 Presentation of the product in google earth

The first result obtained from these processes has already been mentioned: the creation of a
geo-referenced database, which serves as a starting point for later products.

A first product developed has been the transposition of the geo-referenced database with lines
and stations layers to the Google Earth platform. In other words, it means viewing the geometry
of high-speed lines and their stations via satellite. So far, it has been made for European
countries. In the future, it is expected that Atlas-Rail project will be implemented in countries
of other continents that already have high-speed rail services.
For this, it has been necessary to transform the geospatial data, i. e. files with extension .shp
created in the GIS to files type .kml (Keyhole Markup Language). In this way the identification and
displaying of high-speed lines, sections, stations, connections between lines and neighbouring
countries networks are possible using this online platform.

In Google Earth, users can customize the appearance of the railway lines giving different symbology
depending on whether it is a line under construction or in operation, considering colour and
thickness. It is also allowed editing the stations layer format, through the icon change.
Likewise, the platform enables users to select the items to display on the left side of the main
screen and to obtain additional information by double-clicking in the corresponding geospatial
element, either line/section or station. In the first case, clicking a high-speed line displays a
table structure that looks like a GIS attribute table, offering the user the available data of that
object. It is the same with stations layer.

Figure 5. Display of some high-speed lines and stations in Google Earth

Source: Own elaboration from the data provided by the Statistical Yearbook, UIC Passenger Department (2017)

470 360.revista de alta velocidad