Proceeding of the Joint International Symposium on Deformatuon Monitoring. 2-4 November, 2011. Hong Kong. China. Report. In order to determine the relative or absolute railway track and foundation deformations ground based laser scanning technology is utilised in this study to attain a precise 3D track reference. Located in the University of Nottingham's Innovation Park the newly built Nottingham Geospatial Building, where the Nottingham Geospatial Institute is based, has a roof laboratory that has unique testing facilities, including a mini railway track of 120m in length. A test was performed to precisely determine the ground-truth location of the railway track using a phase-based laser scanner for the formation of a standard reference. A real three dimensional mesh of the laser scan data is the basis of the line extraction and the compactly supported radial basis function (CS-RBF) was employed to determine the track features based on 3D mesh approach. To verify the achievable accuracy of laser scanning technology, ground truth points measured with geodetic methods are compared with the sample points and the results are presented in the paper.