Trimble Business Center

Is there a convenient way to edit a line while referencing a separate alignment?  Many times a profile sheet has ditch profiles that reference the road alignment.  I would like to be able to select the ditch line and edit it at the corresponding road alignment station that is called out in the plans.

The way to handle this is to enter the ditch profile as an extra vertical alignment to your alignment - you can enter the station and elevations as grade breaks in the hal. Then add the extra vertical alignment selected from project explorer to your corridor as a reference line. It will then show up as a node above or below the main alignment as a node. Now you need to create the ditch position - you can use an offset elev instruction from the ditch profile val node and for the offsets you can use a 2d line or a table or a table with several 2d lines embedded and for the elevation use a delta of zero - this transfers the z of the ditch profile out to where you need it to be. When you create this node you likely do not want it to create a suface element so deselect all material layers to leave it hanging. Now you can attach the ditch foreslope on one side and the ditch bottom on the other as instructions using this ditch node as the start of the ditch surface. 

If you have ditches on both sides then you can do the same for the other side using another VAL on the alignment

Alan

Thanks, Alan for responding.  What I ended up doing was creating a new corridor called Right Ditch that referenced the road alignment.  I then used tables for the offset/elevation to establish a dummy surface from the centerline out to the ditch bottom.  I then exploded the corridor surface and extracted the ditch bottom line that was created.