What CAD software is used for infrastructure design?

[Crithylum]

I’m wondering what computer aided design software is used by the railway to design infrastructure. Is there a single piece of software which contains everything, or is different software used for different parts of infrastructure design and maintenance?

 

[civ-eng-jim]

Rail systems use Bentley MicroStation with various add-ons or variants for discipline specific tasks. .dgn format

Pway use:
Bentley Rail Track/Power Rail Track
Bentley Open Rail
ClearRoute (gauging)
Trimble for setting out files.

 

[Belperpete]

Back in BR days, S&T used to use its own specialist CAD software for things like signalling plans and circuit design. I understand it was based on commercial software (autocad?). After privatisation, Railtrack and then Network Rail, plus the various private supply companies, continued to use that software, under licence from one of the suppliers who supported it. However, I am not sure what the current situation is.

Network Rail did have a project that was intended to produce various different types of CAD design from an underlying database, but I understand that they have given up on it.

 

[Kentish RYS]

Back in BR days, S&T used to use its own specialist CAD software for things like signalling plans and circuit design. I understand it was based on commercial software (autocad?). After privatisation, Railtrack and then Network Rail, plus the various private supply companies, continued to use that software, under licence from one of the suppliers who supported it. However, I am not sure what the current situation is.

In terms of signalling it is Bentley, what is now MicroStation. I think rather than specialist software, it was mostly symbol sets and the like, though there were add-ons such (I know of one for Signalling Plans by Westinghouse and one that was Alstom, no idea of lineage of both). The Bentley choice was made apparently as the USA DoD and DoT and maybe some other UK places were using it (maybe our MoD for commonality with the USA? It was a long time ago I had the conversation with some people who worked in the BR(S) Signalling Design Office at the time) so that the product would continue to be supported. However, what went on to be AutoCAD became much cheaper to licence and more commonly taught in colleges and such. Bentleys product on the other hand becoming a product used by specific professions only with licence for a year costing over a thousand pounds in the 2010s. There are tools to convert to AutoCAD file format from .dgn, however these are not good enough for critical drawings as details get lost or altered in the process so the drawings are set in the Bentley format without (at least partially) by person recreation and then independent check cycle.