From 10 Years to One Night: How a Bentley Ecosystem Partner Conquered the UK Rail Network
Showcasing the power of their advanced Regression Analysis plugin for OpenRail
When Network Rail released its LiDAR open data, The Cross Product put its Bentley OpenRail regression and geometry-processing add-in to the ultimate test. By automating track regression and rail alignment from point cloud data, the solution showed how infrastructure teams turn large-scale railway data into engineering insights faster.
It used to be a hypothetical question for rail engineers: how long would it take to manually analyze and align the entire UK railway network from 3D data? The answer was measured in years of tedious, repetitive effort.
Now, imagine getting it done in a single night. This was the power of an open ecosystem in action!
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The Challenge: Turning Rail LiDAR Data into Engineering Insight
The promise of LiDAR technology brought unprecedented accuracy, and insight came with a hidden and costly side effect. As railway operators began scanning their entire networks multiple times a year, their engineering teams found themselves buried under a “data avalanche.”
The sheer volume of information was making manual processing not just inefficient, but impossible. It created a critical bottleneck between data collection and the smart decisions that data was supposed to enable. As Philippe Duvivier, Senior Business Developer from TCP, explains, the old methods had reached their breaking point: “A LiDAR point cloud is just a long list of points positioned in 3D. Extracting features, like the rails of a railway, on a project spanning thousands of kilometers is impossible to do manually. Our focus is to automate this processing.”
The critical question for the entire industry then became: How do we get this game-changing automation into the hands of engineers who could turn years of work into just a few hours?
Automating Track Regression with OpenRail and the Bentley Ecosystem Catalog
The partnership with Bentley was the answer. Through the iTwin Activate program, TCP developed an add-on for Bentley OpenRail that automates the complex task of track regression. The solution generates horizontal and vertical alignments as outputs, delivered in LandXML and IFC formats. To ensure this innovation reached its audience, the solution was listed on the Bentley Ecosystem Catalog.
The Catalog acts as a bridge, directly connecting TCP’s cutting-edge technology with the vast community of Bentley users who face these challenges daily.
Following the success of the first integration, TCP developed the TCP Studio, a front-end application based on Cesium, also born from the collaboration in the iTwin Activate program. This new tool transformed the delivery of results, and the strategy remains the same: make it available on the Catalog so that users can not only view but also analyze, prioritize, and collaborate on data interactively.
To demonstrate the power of its solution, TCP processed the entire UK rail network, using data made publicly available by Network Rail. The task, which would have taken approximately 10 years of manual work, was completed by the machine in a single night.
This powerful example, highlighted by the visibility that the Bentley Ecosystem Catalog provides, illustrates a paradigm shift. TCP is not just optimizing a process; it is making previously unfeasible projects possible, and the Catalog is the showcase presenting this new reality to the industry.
Image provided by The Cross Product, highlighting the solution in action
Scaling Rail Automation Through the Bentley Ecosystem
TCP’s vision is clear: to be the automation engine behind the major players in the market. The strategy is not to build a large sales force but to integrate their algorithms into established platforms. The Bentley Ecosystem Catalog is the embodiment of this strategy.
“We believe our long-term business model is indirect. We want to be integrated, via API, into products that already have a massive number of users, like OpenRail. The Catalog is the channel that makes this integration visible and accessible, helping to create awareness that these automated products exist and are within reach,” concludes Duvivier.
By positioning its solutions on the Catalog, TCP not only gains exposure to a global infrastructure development audience but also validates its technology, strengthens its partnership with Bentley, and establishes itself as a key player in the era of digital engineering and digital twins.
Dive deeper into The Cross Product’s case studies to see how their automated solutions are transforming infrastructure projects across the globe. Additional insights about the project are available in The Cross Product’s LinkedIn post.
The Cross Product’s transformative work on TCP Studio leveraged several Cesium products to create a high-performance, large-scale 3D platform. Read their Cesium User Story to learn more about this innovative work with LiDAR data. Then, explore how open-source CesiumJS can help you bring interactive, in-browser 3D visualizations to your own users.
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