The Beta Class of Texas and Pacific Railroad Survey presented by J. Stan Piper, Josh W. Leamons and Andy Nold will be offered for 8-hours of PDHs (including 3 hours of ethics/rules) at this year's Abilene Annual Seminar. Online registration closed; only on-site registration is available on the day of the seminar.

Friday, November 19th
8:00 am - 12:00 pm - The Texas and Pacific Railroad, Part I 
Your instructors, in four hours, will cover the history of the creation of the Texas and Pacific Railroad as a federal railroad and mergers of several other railroads and a general history of the time with the United States needs of Transcontinental travel and communications. This would include the general methods that it was surveying or locating the land certificates inside and outside of the Reservation and the surveyors that did this work. 

You will learn the history of the times in which railroads were built for transcontinental travel and communications and the surveyors methods used at the time for boundary construction, how they located land certificates inside and outside of the reservation and a bit about the surveyors who did the work.

1:00 - 5:00 pm The Texas and Pacific Railway Company Reservation and Land Grant, Part II
To provide surveyors with a better understanding of how to reconstruct survey boundaries within the Texas and Pacific reservation, the instructors will cover primarily the case law of Charles J. Canda, Simion G. Drake, and William Strauss (Texas and Pacific Land Trust), and other Case Laws including Outlaw v Gulf and Proctor v Markham affected the surveys. Included are the methods of boundary construction used in the past and the Law’s requirement of allocating the excess acreage into the School Sections. Also, board rules will be reviewed based on the construction of surveys. (Includes three hours ethics/rules)

Instructors:

J. Stan Piper, RPLS, PLS, LSLS
Stan Piper has over fifty years of surveying experience in West Texas and Southeastern New Mexico.  He holds a Bachelor of Science degree from Texas Tech University, having graduated in 1974. He was awarded the “Young Surveyor of the Year” award in 1981 and the “Surveyor of the Year” award in 2018 by the Texas Society of Professional Surveyors, of which he has been an active member since 1977. 

Stan has held all offices of the TSPS Permian Basin Chapter 10 and received the “Legends of the West” award from the Chapter. He is a past and current Director of TSPS; has served as Program Chairman for the 1987 TSPS Annual Convention; and served on the Nominating Committee. He currently serves on the Education Committee as Chairman and serves as Chair of the Standards Committee.  In addition, Stan has served the Texas Board of Professional Land Surveyors as a member of the Exam Item Writing Committee.

He has prepared and presented numerous papers on various topics of boundary surveying and mapping at seminars for TSPS and was a professor at Odessa College during the fall and spring of 2009, teaching Legal Principles I and II. He is also a member of the New Mexico Professional Surveyors. His professional affiliations are indicative of his dedication to surveying.

His experience in surveying includes global positioning survey control for global information systems, ALTA/ACSM land title surveys, topographical surveys, oil well location surveys, route surveys and boundary surveys.  Stan was pre-certified in November of 2002, by the Texas Department of Transportation, in seven different survey categories.  Stan has experience working with the Texas General Land Office on projects involving hundreds of Original or Corrected Field Notes filings.  His surveying experience includes 68 counties in West Texas and 3 counties in Southeastern New Mexico. 

Since founding Piper Surveying Company in 1981, he has provided competent surveying supervision to nurture the Company to its current stage of development.

Josh W. Leamons, RPLS, ESQ
Josh W. Leamons is a Registered Professional Land Surveyor and Attorney at Law in Texas. Josh practices surveying as a Partner at Searchers Land Surveying, LLC and has over 12 years of land surveying. He received his Bachelor of Science in Technology with a surveying and mapping emphasis from The University of Texas at Tyler and his Doctorate in Jurisprudence from Texas Tech University School of Law. Josh is co-writing Select Statutes and Boundary Decisions, 3rd Edition. He is an Adjunct Professor at The University of Texas at Tyler, where he teaches advanced land surveying courses online.  Josh is an active member of TSPS and received the Young Surveyor of the Year award, 2020.

Timothy A. (Andy) Nold, RPLS
Andy is a professional land surveyor in Texas, North Dakota, Oklahoma, and Colorado. He began his surveying career in West Texas in 1993 working for Frank X. Spencer and Associates. He completed the Tyler junior College Surveying and Mapping program in 1996 and assisted with the startup of the Surveying and Mapping program at Odessa College teaching Survey Mapping as an adjunct professor. Andy is a project surveyor for Transglobal Services, LLC in Fort Worth, Texas.