Modernizing Rail Inspections for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers

The U.S. Army Engineer Research and Development Center (ERDC) executes inspection programs as part of the U.S. Army Transportation Infrastructure Program (ATIP). These inspection, monitoring and assessment programs include airfields, bridges, dams, railroads, waterfront facilities and ranges. To date, the process for these inspection programs has been manually intensive, time consuming and difficult to scale. The US Army Corps is bringing digital business and spatial data collection methods to its inspection program for the military’s railroad infrastructure. By combining GPS and GIS technologies into a mobile data collection solution, added efficiency and data quality has been brought to the field inspection workflow. This modernization effort also results in streamlined data processing and reporting. These improved processes will lead to higher quality data, better analysis of the new richer data content and better decisions made by the end users and stakeholders.