ULTra - Design Guidelines

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Design Guidelines

ULTra Guideway

The current guideway is a 2.1m-wide trough, comprising a flat floor with a central cable tray and 0.25m high kerbs. The guideway is unpowered. It can be constructed of different materials to suit the particular application, examples include steel with pre-cast concrete plank, fiberglass grid floor or simple concrete base with either concrete or plastic kerbs at ground or floor level.

This simple, lightweight guideway allows for significant flexibility in design - the only real constraint is on the inner width of the guideway and the height of the kerbs; they must be at least 1.6m and 0.25m respectively, to ensure room for the vehicle. A safety rail such as that seen in the visualisation above is also required to allow maintenance personnel safe access to the guideway, and in case of emergency passenger evacuation.

Physical Specifications

Below are the dimensions and specifications for the current ULTra guideway. The diagram on the right shows a cross-section view of the standard elevated guideway design.

Overall Steel/Concrete Elevated Guideway Width	2.1 m
Overall Concrete At-Grade Guideway Width	1.75 m
Internal Guideway Width	1.6 m
Internal Guideway Height	0.25 m
External Guideway Depth (for 18m spacing)	0.45 m
Typical Elevated Guideway Headroom for main road crossings	5.7 m
Typical Elevated Guideway Headroom for pedestrian crossings	2.5 m
Typical column spacing	18 m
Typical "long" column spacing	36 m
Typical column load	10 tonnes

3D Design Template

Download: Guideway_Guide.skp

The above file, in Sketchup 7 format, provides a reference template for designing your own custom ULTra guideway. The model provides components with accurate dimensions for the guideway structure, and annotations explaining all of the fundamental requirements for ULTra guideway.

To view and modify this file, you will need to install Sketchup 7 on your computer. Once the file is open, be sure to click through the pre-formatted slides, to receive an annotated tour of the features of the model.

Customization Examples

Some illustrative examples of guideway customization are given below.

Cut-and-Cover Underground

A simple and relatively cheap option for operating ULTra below grade is to run the guideway along a cut-and-cover trench, such as in the visualisations below. This offers the benefit of minimum visual intrusion, and station guideway may be brought up to near-grade for simplified pedestrian access; see the station design guidlines for the corresponding example.

From a rider's perspective, however, elevated guideway will likely provide a better view, and different approaches suit different environments; for the hypothetical Bath network, the link connecting the Cattle Market and Charlotte Street car parks needs to be underground due to the infeasibility of an above-ground route.

Guideway in a cut and cover trench

Cantilevered Support

To further reduce the visual impact and land-use requirements of elevated guideway, in built-up environments it can be cantilevered off existing structures, due to both the lightweight nature of the vehicles and their virtually silent running.