Roller compactor pressing marking on road surface - GIF

[Altair]

Roller compactor pressing marking on road surface.




Previously:

Roller compactor pavement trimming attachment - GIF
Confusing road markings - GIF
Cross section of a road in England - photo
Road resurfacing timelapse - GIF
Route 66 musical road rumble strip - video

[IntheGroove]

Those are probably removed and paint or something is poured into the depressions...

[paul_j]

The brass pieces are indeed removed and placed in the bucket, then carried 600 feet to the next station location in that paving lane. In Illinois, they are stamped in the asphalt at 300 feet intervals, but on alternating sides of the road, thus the 600 feet to the next one. On concrete paving, the intervals are 250 feet on alternating sides. A different type of stamp is used for concrete - each number or symbol has a bar across the back side to allow you to lift it out of the wet concrete without leaving finger marks. Concrete paving also has the date poured stamped in the center of the lane at the starting point each day. Asphalt does not have the date. Nothing is purposely poured in the depressions, and we always tried to position the number to avoid the white edge line that would be placed later. I have placed 1000's of those numbers in pavement here in Southern Illinois.

[Bony]

And the purpose is for ? And why have different increments for different surfaces?

[paul_j]

Hi Bony - the purpose of the number is to identify that specific location along the roadway. Roads are laid out using what they call "stationing" which is simply incremental measurements along the centerline, or possibly the baseline if the layout is offset from the centerline as a rural interstate would be. Station 1 would be 100 feet from station zero. In the example in the video, that number stamp is 108200 feet plus an additional 50 feet from the zero station on that road. That is a simple example - in the real world there are equations at the end of each curve that complicate the simplicity of stationing. A curve is basically an arc that smooths the intersection of two tangent lines. The equations are necessary to adjust for the "shortcut" that the curvature takes in relation to the two tangent lines. This is probably much more than you wanted to know. I tried to stop but I couldn't, ha.

The different increments for different surfaces is a very good question that I can't answer. Some long-dead civil engineer made that decision, and I'm sure it has some logic, but I never could find it, ha.

[Bony]

Thanks Paul. I should have been more specific in my question, for what purpose are distances shown on the road? Where I live there are no markings on the roads but distance from a base is recorded for all road infrastructure, signs, culverts, bridges, overpasses etc and this is used for ID of plans of these items & for maintenance & repair. In the country where there are gravel roads houses are even numbered for the left hand side of the road and odd numbers are used for the right and the number represents the number of metres from the turnoff to that road, rounded to the nearest 10 metres. Eg house number 1560 is 1.56 km from the turnoff on the left side of the road. This assists locating a house for emergency services as well as for the public. But the numbers are not shown on the road, but on the premises (well usually). I presume numbers stamped onto the road surface serve the same purpose, albeit labour intensive and no doubt costly. Hence the question, why bother unless there is quite a compelling reason .... that being ?

[paul_j]

Bony - These numbers stamped in the pavement are only used by the road workers and engineering staff. The general public doesn't even know that they exist.

[hemmjo]

They could very well be used for quality control of the various paving materials. Years down the road (no pun intended) if one section of pavement starts to crumble while the others are ok, you may assume there was something wrong with the mixture.

Just a guess from my point of view,