Towards Integrated Approaches to Digital Documentation of Railway Infrastructure in the Urban Environment

Digital documentation of the built environment and its transformations is increasingly emerging as a strategic tool for achieving sustainability, energy saving and effective decision-making processes. To address the complexity brought on by the phenomena of territorial and urban modification, an integrated approach to digitization in support of intervention processes on the existing heritage does appear to be a feasible option. The actors in the supply chain are being driven toward the use of multiple technologies and integrated information systems by the need to integrate information sources of various kinds, to enable the multi-scalar verification of intervention scenarios –past, present, and future– as well as to correlate the project alternatives to the occasionally involved citizens' unique needs. This contribution details the main outcomes of the management of urban railway networks' transformation using integrated digital technologies. In cooperation with the third-largest manager of the nation's rail system, integrated three-dimensional terrestrial survey, drone, and photographic modeling techniques are applied. As a result, a three-dimensional digital tool that supports decision-making processes and may be used in integrated digital spatial information systems and collaborative environments is developed.