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Railroad Crossing Geo-location, 2001

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SPONSOR: Federal Railroad Administration
VOLPE INTERNAL: Service and Operations Assessment Division, DTS-49

The FRA maintains a database of approximately 300,000 railroad crossings. The database contains many details about each railroad crossing, some of which include railroad milepost, crossing street name, warning device type, train speed, number of traffic lanes, average daily traffic, and number of accidents. The database did not contain a latitude, longitude value which is a requirement for any sort of mapping and GIS based analysis. With latitude and longitude values it would be easy to do such things as generate maps showing the spatial distribution of grade crossing accidents, or select all crossings within a mile of a school.

The Volpe GIS group used advanced GIS techniques involving customized address matching and advanced linear referencing techniques to "put the crossings on the map". Through automated routines 75% of the 300,000 crossings in the database were located while the other 25% mostly contained insufficient data for automated geo-location.

Located Highway-Rail Crossings. (View larger image.)