FRA Form 54 Railroad Accidents — every reportable rail incident since 1975 (224k records)

Dataset · Federal Railroad Administration · primary source ↗

Every reportable rail equipment accident — collision, derailment, fire, explosion, hazmat release — that meets FRA's monetary damage threshold (~$11.5k), since 1975. 224,299 records from FRA Form 54 source data. Per incident: reporting railroad code (NS, BNSF, UP, CSX, AMTK, etc), incident number, date + time, location (state/county/station/milepost), train characteristics (speed, direction, cars involved, hazmat cars derailed, passenger train flag), casualties (railroad employees / passengers / others killed and injured), reportable damage (equipment + track + total), conditions (temperature, visibility, weather), substance testing flags (alcohol, drug). Covers every Class I freight railroad, every Amtrak corridor, every commuter rail (Metra, SEPTA, LIRR, Metro-North, NJ Transit), every short-line. Includes Norfolk Southern East Palestine OH derailment (Feb 2023) and every other newsworthy US rail incident. Powers /rail-accident/{id} canonical Event JSON-LD pages.

Source agency
Federal Railroad Administration
License
CC0 / US public domain
Coverage
224,299 rail accidents since 1975
API endpoint

Keywords

FRA Form 54rail accidenttrain derailmenthazmat derailmentNorfolk SouthernBNSFUnion PacificAmtrak crashrailroad safetyrail collisionfreight train accident

Provenance

Every record in this dataset can be traced back to its primary source at https://railroads.dot.gov/safety-data. Underlying content is a US federal government work (public domain under 17 USC §105); our derived data is licensed CC0 1.0.

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