US Rail Accident, Derailment & Grade Crossing Tracker (FRA)

Get clean, filterable data on US train accidents, derailments and highway-rail grade crossing crashes straight from the official Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) safety database. No login, no proxy, no scraping of websites. Just fast, structured results in JSON, CSV or Excel.

Over 225,000 train accident records and 250,000 grade crossing incident records, refreshed by the FRA regularly.

Who uses this

• Insurance and risk teams checking a railroad's accident history, damage costs and causes.
• Lawyers and investigators looking for derailments, hazmat releases and similar prior incidents.
• Journalists and researchers who need counts by railroad, state, year or cause.
• Cities, counties and safety groups reviewing crashes at local grade crossings.
• Analysts and investors tracking railroad safety trends (BNSF, Union Pacific, CSX, Norfolk Southern, CPKC and 1,000+ others).

What you can do

• Search train accidents and derailments (FRA Form 54) or grade crossing incidents (FRA Form 57).
• Filter by state, railroad, date range, accident type, cause, minimum damage cost.
• Keep only incidents with deaths or injuries, or with a hazmat release.
• Get summary tables grouped by railroad, state, year, cause or accident type, with incident counts, total damage, deaths and injuries.
• Run on a schedule and compare with last month to spot new incidents.

Example inputs

Derailments in Ohio since February 2023 with at least $100,000 damage:

{
  "dataset": "equipment_accidents",
  "states": ["OH"],
  "accidentTypes": ["Derailment"],
  "dateFrom": "2023-02-01",
  "minTotalDamage": 100000,
  "maxResults": 200
}

Which causes are behind accidents in Minnesota, ranked by count:

{
  "dataset": "equipment_accidents",
  "states": ["MN"],
  "outputMode": "summary",
  "groupBy": "cause",
  "maxResults": 25
}

Deadly or injury crashes at grade crossings in Texas since 2024:

{
  "dataset": "grade_crossing_incidents",
  "states": ["TX"],
  "onlyWithCasualties": true,
  "dateFrom": "2024-01-01",
  "maxResults": 500
}

Example output (one record)

{
  "dataset": "equipment_accidents",
  "reportId": "NS171466202608",
  "date": "2026-08-09",
  "railroad": "Norfolk Southern Railway Company",
  "accidentType": "Derailment",
  "state": "OH",
  "county": "MARION",
  "latitude": 40.667163,
  "longitude": -83.085043,
  "trainSpeedMph": 36,
  "primaryCause": "Broken plate",
  "totalDamageUsd": 225466,
  "totalKilled": 0,
  "totalInjured": 0,
  "hazmatCarsReleased": 0,
  "url": "https://safetydata.fra.dot.gov/Officeofsafety/Publicsite/FORM54/F54Report.aspx?..."
}

Each record includes a link to the official FRA report.

Output fields

Train accidents (Form 54): date, time, railroad, parent railroad, accident type, state, county, station, subdivision, milepost, latitude, longitude, equipment type, train speed, gross tonnage, weather, track type, primary and contributing cause, equipment/track/total damage (USD), people killed and injured, hazmat cars, hazmat cars released, persons evacuated, derailed car counts, optional narrative, link to FRA report.

Grade crossing incidents (Form 57): date, time, railroad, state, county, city, road name, crossing ID, public or private, vehicle type, what the road user was doing, equipment struck, train speed, warning devices, weather, visibility, view obstruction, killed, injured, vehicle damage, hazmat, optional narrative, link to FRA report.

Summary rows: group, incidents, total damage (USD), total killed, total injured.

Good to know

• One row per train or equipment involved. An accident with two trains can show up as two rows with the same reportId. Exact duplicate rows are removed for you.
• Data lag. The FRA refreshes the data regularly (the portal showed updates as recent as this week). The newest incidents are usually a few weeks old.
• Damage and cause values are as reported by the railroads and can be amended later by the FRA. Always check the linked FRA report for legal or insurance use.
• No personal data. Driver age and gender fields in Form 57 are deliberately left out. Narratives are off by default.
• Some very old records have no coordinates (shown empty).

Pricing

Pay per result. You only pay for what you receive.

Event	Price
Incident record	$2.50 per 1,000 records
Summary row	$0.01 per row

A typical run (a few hundred records) costs well under $1.

Data source and legal

Data comes from the US Department of Transportation's open data portal (data.transportation.gov), published by the FRA Office of Safety under the "Public Domain U.S. Government" license. This Actor is not affiliated with or endorsed by the FRA or any railroad. Information is provided as is, without warranty.

Tips

• Use a Socrata app token (free at data.transportation.gov) only if you run very large jobs many times a day.
• Schedule a monthly run with dateFrom set to the first of last month to track new incidents.
• Export to CSV or Excel straight from the dataset tab.

Found a bug or need another field? Open an issue on the Actor page.