A GIS Pre and Post Processing Contribution to a Multi Techniques Test Survey for an Ancient Railway Restoration in the Brembana Valley

Stemming from the renewed desire to requalify the former Brembana Valley railway route (inside one of the valleys of the Province of Bergamo and close to the important city of Milan), from Bergamo to Villa d’Almè, in 2017 the Bergamo Transport Company and other partners have signed a memorandum of understanding. They have also entrusted a project company to develop a technical and economic viability study, which would be an update of a preliminary one presented in 2009. A private proposal for the realization of a test survey, useful for the required engineering project, has been submitted to the project company and accepted. For this reason, a team, comprising different companies, and among them also the Geomatics group at the University of Bergamo, was formed so as to perform this task and develop it in a degree thesis. The aim of the test survey is to evaluate a joint use of the new available technologies, so as to possibly get faster, more economic and thorough results, by performing a 3D metric analysis over two sub-areas selected along the route. The paper describes this experience and the achieved results. In particular, the areas of interest in the test project have been analyzed first thing with a GIS software and then surveyed with a multi-sensor approach, i.e. terrestrial laser scanner, GNSS techniques and UAV. The final integrated results allowed providing a metric model of the morphological and urban aspect for the territorial layout, useful also for further advanced GIS analyses. The analysis of the reached precisions has provided satisfactory results which agree with the metric requirements of the project. Further meaningful considerations can be derived from this test survey: the implementation of different techniques has helped to overcome problems due to hidden parts in complex objects, it has allowed to provide a faster survey and to test different technologies and software packages. The results have been quite satisfactory.