PROJECT EXPERIENCE:
Dulles Corridor Metrorail, Dulles Transit Engineers
Location: FAIRFAX & LOUDOUN COUNTIES, VA

Project Background: The new Dulles Metrorail Project will be a 23-mile transit line beginning in East Falls Church and extending to Ashburn in Loudoun County. The 2-Phase project will include 11 new stations, four of which will be in Tysons Corner.

Phase 1 construction which represents the segment between East Falls Church and Wiehle Avenue in Reston will begin in the Spring of 2009 and is expected to be completed in 2013. The estimated cost for Phase 1 is $2.6 billion.

Work Performed: Rice Associates provided ground control and mapping of the entire corridor from West Falls Church to Dulles Airport and beyond. The project was challenging in that base work and design from a conceptual standpoint had started on an old and inferior mapping product.

To ensure that as much of the concept information as possible could be preserved it was imperative that the existing ground control system was used to create the new product.
Much of the base system had been destroyed by construction over the years necessitating careful densification that would support future survey efforts while being cost effective for the mapping task at hand. Rice Associates began by recovering and preserving all of the existing control, then working with AeroMetric and the Washington Group, to create a control network that provided:

• Outstanding quality design level mapping
• Intermediate ground control for future corridor development
• Simultaneous convenient conventional control stations for use now and in the future for geotechnical investigation, right-of-way acquisition, and obscured area fill in topography

The design phase of this multi-billion project is ongoing. The survey corridor mapping project and subsequent supplemental requests for ground pavement acquisition were completed on time within budget.