3D Scanning in Truckee, CA

Truckee grew up around the railroad. The Central Pacific had named its station Truckee by August 1867, a year before the tracks reached it in 1868, and the line still runs through downtown, where Amtrak's California Zephyr stops every day. Commercial Row is the old main street. One block north of it, the Old Truckee Jail on Jibboom Street was built in 1875 of native stone, with lower walls 32 inches thick, and stayed in use until May 1964. Downtown is covered by the Town's Historic Preservation Overlay District. Any exterior improvement there that needs a land use or building permit goes through Historic Design Review, with the Historic Preservation Advisory Commission reviewing the application, and the Town's 2003 historic resources inventory ranks buildings from Essential (Category A) to Non-Essential (Category D). An architect preparing that submittal needs the facade, roofline, and floor levels as they really are. A scan records them in one visit without touching historic fabric.

On the old railyard downtown, the Truckee Railyard Master Plan covers about 75 acres around Donner Pass Road, Bridge Street, Church Street, and Trout Creek Road. Its maximum allowable development includes up to 570 homes, a 60-room hotel, a 1,000-seat movie theater, a grocery store, and a civic building. New buildings like those need construction verification. We check anchor bolts and structural steel to 1/8 inch from the scan, take total station check shots on any bolt group near tolerance, and map slab deviation and levelness before and after the pour. Snow shapes the older stock as well. Truckee averages 206.6 inches of snow a year, and the Town declares the whole town a snow area with snow load criteria set in its own municipal code. When an engineer is evaluating an addition or a reroof, scanned roof framing, attic, and crawlspace conditions give them measured geometry to work from.

We set primary GNSS control, carry secondary control with a Trimble S3 total station, and register every Trimble X9 setup to that network in Trimble Business Center, in US survey feet. Control is held to 0.01 US survey feet relative to project control. You receive a registered, cleaned point cloud (E57, LAS, or RCP), scan-to-CAD plans, sections and elevations, 3D linework and coded points, and a report stating the control basis, units, and accuracy achieved. Our office is in Lotus, in El Dorado County, and Truckee is reached over Interstate 80, so we plan field days here as a mobilization and fit exterior work around the snow. Interiors can be scanned all winter. See 3D laser scanning, as-built surveys, scanning in Auburn, and our Truckee surveying page.