A four-year project to map America's rail lines and generate information for people who want to find trains and the places they go. When scouting photo locations, I want to know how many trains might pass through in a given day. Working in the field, I want to know the arrangement of tracks, towns, and mileposts to decipher the dispatcher and crews on the radio. Grades and elevation, track speed, train counts and typical speeds all tell important stories: is this a busy mainline or a quiet branch? If I hear a train is waiting in another town, how long until it reaches me once it gets going? Often, there isn't good phone reception out along the vast railroad network. I wanted something I could print out and shove in a pocket, something that was easy to read without a lot of fiddly details.
Railroads report safety and licensing information. These data sets are incomplete, disjoint, and of varying quality. I have written a small collection of software to coalesce self-reported railroad data and convert it from tables into maps and information in the style of modern employee time tables. Employee timetables contain nearly everything a railroader needs to know - except the train schedule itself. Taken as a whole, a fairly good overall representation starts to form while inaccuracies remain. Instead of crowd sourcing the data collection and error correction, the software is designed to re-generate a nation-wide document as new data becomes available. The goal is not perfect accuracy, but a consistent, nationwide overview for people exploring the railroad landscape.
The railroad map uses thickness to represent the average number of trains per day. Traffic may taper out towards the end of a line, consult the tables below for more accurate information. Lines, yards, and cities are labeled as space allows.
Each table represents one railroad line and is identified using the branch or subdivision name reported by the railroad. The overall compass direction of the line is listed for context. Each town along the line within the given state is listed. If a railroad line begins or ends outside the state, those terminal locations are also shown. The average mile post for each town is shown, if the railroad prefixes the mileposts with a unique letter code, this is included. If available, the average speed is shown for each town. The typical number of trains per day are listed. A p denotes that passenger trains use the line. The number of tracks is illustrated by the thickness of the line running beside the table. The grade chart shows the elevation of the track, in feet, for each milepost along the line. Finally, railroad radio channels commonly used along the line are listed.