Railroad accidents - OSINT Toolbox

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Railroad Accidents (FRA)

Train accidents and highway-rail grade crossing incidents reported to the Federal Railroad Administration, from 1975 to the most recent filing. Pick Train accidents for derailments, collisions and other accidents involving rail equipment, or Crossing incidents for trains and vehicles or people at road crossings. The data has no names. Searches run live against the U.S. Department of Transportation's open-data portal.

How to use this page (tips and what to know)

Two sets: Train accidents are reported on FRA Form 54 (damage above a reporting threshold, any derailment or collision). Crossing incidents are Form 57 (every train-versus-vehicle or person event at a crossing, whatever the damage).
Search by place: state, county, and for crossings the city. State accepts a name or a 2-letter code.
Search by railroad: part of the name works (“BNSF”, “Norfolk”, “Amtrak”).
Kind of accident / user: for train accidents, words such as “derailment”, “collision” or “hwy-rail”; for crossings, who was struck (“pedestrian”, “auto”, “truck”).
Cause (train accidents) matches the cause text the railroad reported, for example “broken rail”, “brake”, “highway user”.
One accident can appear twice. When trains of two railroads are involved, each railroad files its own report, so the same event shows once per railroad.
The narrative is the railroad's own short note, often in capital letters and abbreviations. The FRA link opens the official report where one is posted.
Names of railroad employees are replaced by their job (“the engineer reported…”), the same way the NTSB writes its reports, so you still read what each person said or did. The check is automatic and catches names written in the usual ways; a name written some other way could still appear.
Counts of deaths include everyone killed in the reports that match, so they can double-count an accident filed by two railroads.
Related: serious rail accidents are also investigated by the NTSB, and a crossing crash may appear in fatal road crashes if a vehicle occupant died.

Credit: accident data from the Federal Railroad Administration through the U.S. Department of Transportation open-data portal (Forms 54 and 57), searched live. Railroads file these reports themselves; the FRA's own pages are the official record.