Found by accident - Things you don't see while driving

[+user13371]

Y'know, I had no intention of boasting about how I bicycled 108 miles today. But I found a benchmark(NE1298) today without even trying, so I thought it was worth mentioning. A very odd story in itself.

 

I was around mile 95 of my ride, when I came to a police road-block. There had been an accident on the road ahead, and they had it closed off so wreckers could remove the vehicles. The police were directing people to a detour that would have taken me about 5 miles out of my way.

 

The extra distance wouldn't have bothered me. But I knew the detour route included a terribly rutted dirt road. So I turned off, went a few blocks along the detour, then came back along trails to the main road. This shorter detour accessible to pedestrians and bicycles would not have worked for a car, but it did take me well past the accident scene. The only reason the police were detouring everyone so far out of the way is that the accident occured in a long stretch of nothingness -- no other cross streets for cars to use to get back on track.

 

I now had a several miles of this "closed" main road to myself, and could dally as I liked. Around mile 98, I stopped to drink some water and noticed two witness posts next to each other,; sure enough there were Michigan Department Of Transportation disks in the ground there. I marked the waypoint and looked it up when I got home.

 

I haven't seen two disks that close together before. Anyone know why that was done?

 

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LDR.

[survey tech]

If the two points are within a few feet of each other and they are the same distance from the road, there is no obvious explanation, it would be advantageous to know what is marked on them. If one is farther from the road than the other, they may represent a jog in the right-of-way line.

[+user13371]

quote:

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Originally posted by survey tech:

If the two points are within a few feet of each other and they are the same distance from the road, there is no obvious explanation, it would be advantageous to know what is marked on them. If one is farther from the road than the other, they may represent a jog in the right-of-way line.

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Well, that is a puzzle then. They're about twelve feet apart, in a line parallel to the road. The markings are no help to me: The north one is simply marked "44018" and the other "44018 No. 2"

 

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LDR.

[+Black Dog Trackers]

LDR, what you found is NE1298 and its Reference Mark 2.

 

Click on "view original datasheet" for NE1298 and you will see that Reference Mark 2 is about 6 meters from the main station, and that there is also Reference Mark 1 just about directly on the opposite side of the main station from Reference Mark 2 that you found.

 

Also, there is an azimuth mark, which has its own PID (NE1301) that you might look for next time (1/2 mile away).

[+user13371]

Yup, I read that when I logged the find -- but I don't nderstand how the marks so close together are used?

 

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LDR.

[+user13371]

.

[Z15]

I am retired from the MDOT (2002) and the surveyor (CCL) that set those marks used to be my area supervisor in the 1980's. He has been retired for about 7 yrs. I also new most of the guys on that crew and they are all retired.

 

44018 is code for the area and the point number. MDOT has roads divided up into 5 digit control sections, the stations are similar, 44 indicates the county Lapeer, 018 is the unique station number. There should be 001 thru 017 and maybe beyond established. Much of this work was in support of aerial mapping for new highway construction. Often aerial mapping covers vast areas to plan the routes of the proposed new highways. The 2 reference marks are set to validate the position of the station marker. It was common practice for NGS Bluebook jobs to have the station marker, underground mark and 1 or 2 RM's as possible. RM's are usually set at less than 100 ft from the Stan. That's the common length of a survey chain, every survey crew would have one and it would be easy to measure the location from the RM's and did up the underground mark if needed. We have had to do this on occasion.

 

A lot of these marks were established when NGS was in the SE part of the state in the mid 1970's doing one of the last triangulation surveys. These were traverse surveys, although today they would be GPS surveys as we are still establishing them but not bluebooking the projects because NGS was not accepting any more horizontal control projects unless is was pre-approved by them, they wanted more vertical control and gravity surveys. I was asked to volunteer to work on the NGS survey but declined. NGS needed people to man target lights and climb towers, could not get me to climb any stinking 100ft towers at night. As one of the guys who did told us, he used to sit on the tower all night and cry as the lights in the bars are turned offm it was a boring job sitting on a tower for 8 hrs more or less. I wanted to work with the leveling parties but they had enough people for that.

 

[This message was edited by elcamino on May 18, 2003 at 06:29 AM.]