us_rail_narn — North American Rail Network (2026)

Description

The North American Rail Network (NARN) of the US Federal Railroad Administration (FRA), part of the National Transportation Atlas Database (NTAD) of the Bureau of Transportation Statistics: a topological database of the railway lines of the United States (all 50 states and the District of Columbia; at a scale of 1:24,000 or better), Canada and Mexico, with their owners, the railroads with trackage rights, the passenger services and the strategic rail corridors. The dataset was created in 2016 and is updated in place; this is the version updated on October 19, 2026.

Nodes are the FRA's topological nodes (junctions, ends of lines, and points where the attributes of a line change, e.g. at state or county borders), and edges are the rail links between them, from the "from" node to the "to" node of each link (the network is undirected). All the links are included, whatever their kind (property net): main lines (95,932 links), other tracks such as minor industrial leads (88,559), yard tracks (79,028), major industrial leads (16,130), passing sidings (10,193), out-of-service lines (6,554), abandoned lines (4,267), trails on former rights-of-way (1,473), abandoned lines that were physically removed (623), and rail ferry connections (15). The network has parallel edges (13,673, e.g. tracks running side by side between the same nodes) and 71 self-loops (e.g. loops of yard tracks), and 253 components (the largest with 249,070 of the 250,204 nodes). The geometries of the links are not included.

The network has the following properties:

(Node) node_id: the FRA node id.
(Node) latitude and longitude.
(Node) country (US, CA, MX).
(Node) state: the state or province.
(Node) county_fips: the FIPS code of the US state and county.
(Node) fra_district: the FRA district (1 to 8 in the US, 99 outside).
(Node) passenger: the passenger service at the station (A Amtrak, B Amtrak and commuter, C commuter).
(Node) station: the name of the commuter station.
(Node) boundary: whether the node is on a border (0 none, 1 state, 2 international, 3 county).
(Edge) link_id: the FRA link id.
(Edge) owners: the reporting marks of the (up to three) railroads in charge of dispatching, maintenance and/or ownership of the line.
(Edge) trackage_rights: the reporting marks of the (up to nine) railroads with trackage rights.
(Edge) net: the kind of link (M main network, O other track, Y yard, I major industrial lead, S passing siding over 4,000 feet, X out of service, A abandoned, T trail on a former rail right-of-way, R abandoned and removed, F rail ferry).
(Edge) tracks: the number of main line tracks.
(Edge) passenger: the passenger service on the line (A Amtrak, B Amtrak and commuter, C commuter, D Alaska Railroad, E intercity high-speed rail and commuter, I intercity high-speed rail, R rapid transit, T tourist, museum or scenic, O Ontario Northland, V Via Rail Canada).
(Edge) stracnet: whether the line is on the Strategic Rail Corridor Network (S) or a connector to it (C).
(Edge) division, subdivision, branch and yard: the names of the railroad's division, subdivision, branch or line, and yard.
(Edge) country, state, county_fips and fra_district: as for the nodes.
(Edge) timezone (E, C, M, P, Z Arizona, K Alaska, H Hawaii).
(Edge) length: the length of the link (km). Missing values are empty strings or -1.

Tags

Transportation Rail Spatial Weighted Multigraph Metadata

Added

2026-10-31

Citation

Federal Railroad Administration, Bureau of Transportation Statistics, "North American Rail Network Lines." National Transportation Atlas Database (NTAD), dataset (2026) 10.21949/1528950 Sci-Hub
Federal Railroad Administration, Bureau of Transportation Statistics, "North American Rail Network Nodes." National Transportation Atlas Database (NTAD), dataset (2026) 10.21949/1529070 Sci-Hub

Upstream URL OK

https://www.arcgis.com/home/item.html?id=e143f436d4774402aa8cca1e663b1d24
https://www.arcgis.com/home/item.html?id=54f40ddee0844fb285dafb13a6b2f623
https://services.arcgis.com/xOi1kZaI0eWDREZv/ArcGIS/rest/services

Upstream license

Public domain (US government work), https://www.usa.gov/government-works

Networks

Tip: hover over a column header for a description.

Column legend

$\left<k\right>$: Mean degree
$\sigma_k$: Standard deviation of the degrees
$\lambda_h$: Largest eigenvalue of the Hashimoto (non-backtracking) matrix
$\tau$: Random walk mixing time
$r$: Degree assortativity
$c$: Global clustering coefficient
$\oslash$: (Pseudo-) diameter
$S$: Relative size of the largest component
NPs: Node properties
EPs: Edge properties

Name	Nodes	Edges	$\left<k\right>$	$\sigma_k$	$\lambda_h$	$\tau$	$r$	$c$	$\oslash$	$S$	Kind	Mode	NPs	EPs	gt	GraphML	GML	csv
us_rail_narn	250,204	302,774	2.42	0.86	2.63	1510441.65	-0.01	0.06	1,658	1.00	Undirected	Unipartite	node_id longitude latitude country state county_fips passenger station fra_district boundary	link_id owners trackage_rights state country county_fips division subdivision branch yard passenger stracnet net timezone fra_district tracks length	11.8 MiB	15.3 MiB	15.0 MiB	15.4 MiB

Ridiculograms^*

^* These are automatically generated force-directed visualizations, and can be quite meaningless for networks both big and small. They should not be taken seriously as sources of scientific insight. See here for a discussion.