Closures, reopenings and bridges in the crossing records

Talk about railroad crossings is usually about places where cars, bikes or people cross the track on the level. The federal inventory holds two other kinds of record as well: crossings that have been closed, and crossings where the road and the railroad pass on different levels, over a bridge or through an underpass. This note explains how each is defined and reported, what the historical record shows about closures and reopenings since 1975, and how many grade-separated records the current dataset holds.

Records outside the map

Rail Crossing Atlas, as its sources and dates page says, covers crossings reported open and at track level: 203,136 of them in the FRA inventory of 3 November 2026. The inventory itself is larger. When a crossing closes, its record is not deleted; a field marks it closed. A crossing on two levels has its own inventory number and record too, with its position given as railroad under the road or railroad over the road.

Both kinds of record matter to anyone who works with the counts. A total that includes closed or grade-separated records will not match a total of open crossings at track level, and a comparison over time has to allow for crossings that left the at-grade count in either way.

What counts as closed

The definition is in 49 CFR 234.401. A closed crossing is one where the railroad tracks, or all of the road or path approaches to the crossing, have been physically removed. The rule adds that a grade-separated crossing that has been removed is closed as well.

The wording asks about removal, which is a question about what is on the ground. A record is meant to show a crossing as closed once the track or every approach is gone, not when a closure is first proposed or announced. Until the removal happens, the record should still describe an open crossing.

How openings and closures reach the record

The rules in 49 CFR Part 234, Subpart F set separate paths for the start of a record, for changes to it, and for its regular review.

• A new crossing. Under section 234.407, a new crossing gets its inventory number through the primary operating railroad, the one that owns or maintains the track, and its initial data is submitted to the inventory.
• A crossing that was never reported. Section 234.405 set a deadline of August 9, 2016 for crossings that had been missed: by then they had to be given inventory numbers and reported.
• A closure. Section 234.411 requires a closure to reach the inventory within three months. Unlike changes of surface or warning device, which the section writes for public crossings, the closure rule applies to public and private crossings alike.
• The regular update. Section 234.409 asks for up-to-date data on each crossing at least every three years, but leaves out closed and grade-separated crossings.

The last point has a practical result. Once a record is marked closed or describes a crossing on two levels, the three-year cycle no longer reaches it, so the other details on it can be older than on a record at track level. The first note in this series, how the U.S. railroad crossing inventory is kept, describes both deadlines in full.

Closures and reopenings by decade

FRA also publishes a historical inventory that keeps earlier versions of each record. Rail Crossing Atlas counts the changes in it field by field, 5,340,921 since 1975 in the version updated on 27 October 2026, and shows them by the date of the report on its changes page. Two of its categories are reported closures and reported reopenings, where a reopening means a record marked closed that was later reported open again.

Dates refer to reports, not confirmed construction dates. A closure that happened on the ground in one year may be reported the next, or later still if it was missed at the time.

What the table can and cannot show

The Atlas page gives three cautions with these figures, and each one changes how the table should be read.

1. Each count is a changed field. One report can contribute several changes, so the rows count reported changes of status, not separate crossings.
2. The dates are report dates. They show when a change entered the record, not when a crossing was built, closed or rebuilt.
3. Some crossings are left out. Crossings with records that could not be reconciled are omitted from the counts.

Two of the rows also cover less than a full decade. The first runs from 1975 to 1979, five years, and the last runs from 2020 to the version of 27 October 2026, less than seven. Set beside a full ten-year row, they look smaller partly because they are shorter.

It is tempting to subtract the reopenings from the closures, or to add the rows up, and call the result a number of crossings that have gone. Neither sum means that. The same crossing can be reported closed, reported open and reported closed again, and each report is counted in the period when it was filed. The count of reopenings also does not say whether a reopening reflects work on the ground or a correction to an earlier report: the count does not separate the two. The table is better read as a record of reporting activity over time, one row at a time.

The table also says nothing about why a crossing closed. Closures can be read record by record, together with their history, but these totals do not sort them by cause.

Crossings on two levels

A grade-separated crossing is one where the road and the railroad cross at different heights. The inventory form records this in the position field, next to the crossing's type and purpose: at grade, railroad under the road, or railroad over the road. A road bridge over the tracks is recorded as railroad under the road, and a railroad bridge over a street as railroad over the road.

Rail Crossing Atlas does not count these records, so the figures below come straight from the FRA dataset on data.transportation.gov, queried on 3 November 2026. They cover grade-separated records not marked closed.

The two positions do not overlap, so together they come to 39,609 records, and in both positions public crossings make up the large majority. These counts are kept apart from the Atlas totals on purpose. They come from a separate query on a dataset that is updated on its own schedule, and they are not added to the 203,136 crossings at track level anywhere in these notes.

The historical figures above have no matching series for grade separations, so this note gives no trend for them. The counts in the table describe the records as they stand today, not the years in which the bridges and underpasses were built.

Reading a closed or grade-separated record

A few habits help when one of these records turns up in a search.

1. Check the position before anything else. A record for a bridge has an inventory number like any other, but it does not describe a crossing at track level.
2. Check the closed field and the revision date together. A closure has three months to reach the inventory, so a recent closure may not show yet, and an older record may describe a crossing that has since changed.
3. Read the history. Earlier versions of the record show when its status changed and what changed with it. The Rail Crossing Atlas guide to reading a crossing record's history shows where to find them.
4. Treat the totals as reports. Counts of closures and reopenings describe what was filed and when, and should be quoted that way.

The state counts in the previous note, U.S. railroad crossings, state by state, cover open crossings at track level only, so none of the records described here appear in them. The definitions quoted in this note are in 49 CFR 234.401.

Sources

Figures are as the source showed them on the date given. Rail Crossing Atlas figures come from the FRA crossing inventory of the date stated in the text.

1. 49 CFR 234.401: definitions for crossing inventory reporting (Cornell Legal Information Institute). Read 3 November 2026.
2. 49 CFR 234.405: initial data for previously unreported crossings (Cornell Legal Information Institute). Read 3 November 2026.
3. 49 CFR 234.407: initial data for new crossings (Cornell Legal Information Institute). Read 3 November 2026.
4. 49 CFR 234.409: periodic updates to the crossing inventory (Cornell Legal Information Institute). Read 3 November 2026.
5. 49 CFR 234.411: changes that must be reported within three months (Cornell Legal Information Institute). Read 3 November 2026.
6. Rail Crossing Atlas: weekly changes and historical changes by decade. Read 3 November 2026.
7. Rail Crossing Atlas: sources and dates. Read 3 November 2026.
8. Crossing Inventory Data, Current: the FRA dataset on data.transportation.gov. Read 3 November 2026.
9. Rail Crossing Atlas guide: reading a crossing record's history. Read 3 November 2026.