Skip to main content
Navigate back to homepage
Open search bar.
Open main navigation menu

Main navigation

  • Study
    UCL Portico statue
    Study at UCL

    Being a student at UCL is about so much more than just acquiring knowledge. Studying here gives you the opportunity to realise your potential as an individual, and the skills and tools to thrive.

    • Undergraduate courses
    • Graduate courses
    • Short courses
    • Study abroad
    • Centre for Languages & International Education
  • Research
    Tree-of-Life-MehmetDavrandi-UCL-EastmanDentalInstitute-042_2017-18-800x500-withborder (1)
    Research at UCL

    Find out more about what makes UCL research world-leading, how to access UCL expertise, and teams in the Office of the Vice-Provost (Research, Innovation and Global Engagement).

    • Engage with us
    • Explore our Research
    • Initiatives and networks
    • Research news
  • Engage
    UCL Print room
    Engage with UCL

    Discover the many ways you can connect with UCL, and how we work with industry, government and not-for-profit organisations to tackle tough challenges.

    • Alumni
    • Business partnerships and collaboration
    • Global engagement
    • News and Media relations
    • Public Policy
    • Schools and priority groups
    • Visit us
  • About
    UCL welcome quad
    About UCL

    Founded in 1826 in the heart of London, UCL is London's leading multidisciplinary university, with more than 16,000 staff and 50,000 students from 150 different countries.

    • Who we are
    • Faculties
    • Governance
    • President and Provost
    • Strategy
  • Active parent page: UCL Engineering
    • Study
    • Active parent page: Research
    • Collaborate
    • Departments
    • News and events
    • People
    • About

SnakeGrid

SnakeGrid is a concept developed at UCL that develops low-distortion coordinate systems for large engineering infrastructure projects – in particular railways, highways and pipelines.

Breadcrumb trail

  • UCL Engineering
  • Research

Faculty menu

  • Case studies
  • Centres, Institutes and Labs
  • Disruptive Thinkers: Video Series
  • Intelligent Mobility @UCL: The Podcast
  • REF 2021
  • Current page: Research projects
  • Research strategy

Visit Snakegrid's external website

For this type of project, the curvature of the earth is significant and conventional mapping and coordinate systems have to introduce distortions in order to be able to represent the work on a horizontal plane. This then leads to problems when relating 2D designs to the actual construction on the ground. The SnakeGrid algorithm gets around this by providing a single seamless coordinate system with a scale factor within a few parts per million of unity all along the route and for several kilometres on either side – even for projects that extend for hundreds of kilometres.

Effectively, this means that all computations on the project can be treated using a ‘flat earth’ assumption, eliminating the need for corrections and adjustments, and reducing the possibility of costly misunderstandings.

SnakeGrid is used on all major rail routes in the UK, and on some overseas projects. The algorithms it develops are incorporated into software and equipment by most of the major survey manufacturing companies.

Over the last year, several new SnakeGrid coordinate systems have been adopted, including one for a major pipeline project in Cumbria. A new software suite called SnakeGrid Projector has also been developed for Network Rail as a plug-in to Feature Manipulation Engine software (FME), enabling Network Rail to transform data of many different types and in many different formats, between the different coordinate systems that they use.

A paper on SnakeGrid, ‘The development and analysis of quasi-linear map projections’, was published in Cartography and Geographic Information Science (May 2017).

Surveyors and engineers usually have to use correction terms to account for the difference between 2D plans and the real earth. This leads to the possibility of mistakes, and is difficult to implement for very long projects. SnakeGrid gets around this by ‘unpeeling’ the earth along the length of the project, a bit like unpeeling an apple or an orange - but using mathematical algorithms, rather than a knife!

Author

Dr Jonathan Iliffe

Visit

Take a look at Snakegrid's external website.

More from UCL Engineering...

Engineering Foundation Year
UCL East Marshgate building at dusk

Programme Spotlight

Engineering Foundation Year

We'll help you to gain new knowledge, learn academic and study skills, and develop your confidence levels so you'll have what it takes to transform your life.

Inaugural Lectures
Farhaneen Mazlan delivering a talk at UCL

Event series

Inaugural Lectures

An opportunity to explore ground-breaking research that is shaping the future and transforming the world.

Disruptive Thinkers Video Series
Dr Claire Walsh looking at a human organ in an imaging facility

Watch Now

Disruptive Thinkers Video Series

From making cities more inclusive to using fibre optics in innovative medical procedures, explore the disruptive thinking taking place across UCL Engineering.

UCL footer

Visit

  • Bloomsbury Theatre and Studio
  • Library, Museums and Collections
  • UCL Maps
  • UCL Shop
  • Contact UCL

Students

  • Accommodation
  • Current Students
  • Moodle
  • Students' Union

Staff

  • Inside UCL
  • Staff Intranet
  • Work at UCL
  • Human Resources

UCL social media menu

  • Link to Soundcloud
  • Link to Flickr
  • Link to TikTok
  • Link to Youtube
  • Link to Instagram
  • Link to Facebook
  • Link to Twitter

University College London, Gower Street, London, WC1E 6BT

Tel: +44 (0) 20 7679 2000

© 2025 UCL

Essential

  • Disclaimer
  • Freedom of Information
  • Accessibility
  • Cookies
  • Privacy
  • Slavery statement
  • Log in