>I'll look into data shortcuts for future projects, although am I right in thinking I would need to create shortcuts for all information I want in my drawing (existing surface, alignment I want sections on, corridor I want shown)?
Yes you will need shortcuts for each. And the cool thing is they are super-easy to create and work with. One key thing when working with shortcuts (same goes for xrefs) is to have a good data management process. And document the procedures if you have a lot of users. In addition to the help files, there are some good post's here in the forum describing different methods of how project data is organized.
Happy C3D'ing !
ACADuser
Civil 3D 2018, Raster Design 2018
Windows 7 Enterprise
Dell Precision 5810 Workstation
Intel Xeon E5-1630 v3 @ 3.70GHz
32GB RAM, NVIDIA Quadro K2200 4 GB GDDR5
DUAL 27" Dell UltraSharp U2713HM