Railroad crossings state by state, and how to read the counts

Rail Crossing Atlas publishes crossing counts for each state. This note puts all 51 rows in one alphabetical table, the 50 states and the District of Columbia, and explains what each column counts, which total each share is taken from, and how to compare two states without comparing unlike things.

What the table counts

The figures come from the FRA inventory of 3 November 2026, as Rail Crossing Atlas presents it. The Atlas covers crossings reported open and at track level. Bridges that carry a railroad over a road, or a road over a railroad, are not in the table, and neither are crossings reported closed. The note on closed and grade-separated crossings covers both of those groups.

The rows add up to the national figures used throughout these notes: 203,136 crossings in all, of which 126,083 are public and 77,053 are private or have no type recorded. Each record names the state and county where the crossing lies, and each crossing is counted once, in that state.

The table

The third number column is the first minus the second. The last gives the share of the state's public crossings with a quiet-zone designation, rounded to one decimal place.

Reading the columns

The first two number columns are counts of records. The third is not a separate count of private crossings. It holds every record that is not marked public, including records whose type field is blank. The note on public and private railroad crossings explains why a blank type cannot be read as private, and why public crossings are half of the total or less in 11 of the 51 rows.

The last column calls for care. Its denominator is the state's public crossings, not all of its crossings, because quiet zones are built from public highway-rail crossings and the Atlas counts only those. Nationally, 4,921 of the 126,083 public crossings carry a quiet-zone designation, about 3.9 percent. To turn a state's share back into a number of crossings, multiply it by the public column, not by the column of all crossings.

Seven rows show zero: Arkansas, Delaware, the District of Columbia, Hawaii, Nevada, New Hampshire and Rhode Island. That leaves 44 states with at least one quiet-zone crossing, which matches the 44 states on the Atlas quiet zones page. West Virginia shows "under 0.1" rather than zero. With 1,346 public crossings, a share below one tenth of one percent can only mean a single crossing.

Why the rows are in alphabetical order

The table could be sorted by any column, and a sorted list would read like a contest. It is not one. A count of crossings says how many places the inventory records where a road or path meets the track. It says nothing about how those places are equipped, how many trains or vehicles pass, or how carefully the records are kept. A larger number is neither better nor worse than a smaller one, so the rows stay in the order of their names, which also makes any state easy to find.

The same holds for the quiet-zone column. A quiet zone is set up by a local public authority under federal rules, so each state's share reflects decisions taken town by town. The note on how a U.S. city sets up a railroad quiet zone walks through those rules and the notices they require.

Comparing two states

Counts alone are a weak basis for comparing states of different size. Shares work better, as long as both are taken from the same kind of total. Even then, two rows with the same share can describe very different numbers of crossings.

Arizona and Illinois both show 10.3 percent of public crossings in a quiet zone. Arizona has 688 public crossings and Illinois has 7,781, so the same share stands for about 70 crossings in one and about 800 in the other. Both figures are correct, and each answers a different question. The share tells you how common quiet zones are among a state's public crossings; the count tells you how many such crossings there are.

A few habits keep comparisons fair:

1. Use the same total on both sides. A share of public crossings cannot be set beside a share of all crossings.
2. Use the same date. These counts are for the inventory of 3 November 2026. Figures from an older download will differ, because records are added and corrected every week. In the week of 26 October 2026 alone, 2,404 records changed and 19 new records appeared.
3. Keep public and private apart when equipment or road traffic comes into it, since the published device groups and road count years cover public crossings only.
4. Do not read a cause into a difference. The table shows that two states differ, but it cannot show why.

Who keeps a state's records current

The duty to report each crossing falls on its primary operating railroad, the one that owns or maintains the track, under 49 CFR Part 234, Subpart F. States can take part as well. Under section 234.403, a state agency may submit inventory data on a railroad's behalf, after giving FRA written notice that it will do so.

Whoever submits it, each record must be brought up to date at least every three years, and a closure, a sale or, at public crossings, a change of surface or warning device must reach the inventory within three months. The first note in this series, how the U.S. railroad crossing inventory is kept, sets out both deadlines. For a state table, this means the rows are only as current as the records behind them. A crossing closed last month may still be counted, and one opened recently may not appear yet.

From a row to the records behind it

Every number in the table is a sum of individual records, and each of them can be opened. Rail Crossing Atlas lists the railroad crossings by state, with a page for each state that maps all of its crossings, public and private, and sums up their warning devices. Its quiet zones page leads to a page for each state that lists the quiet-zone crossings by city.

The same records are in the FRA dataset on data.transportation.gov, where they can be filtered by state and county. A state's count taken straight from the dataset may differ by a few records from the table above, because the dataset is updated on its own schedule and the Atlas reads it as of a given date.

The Atlas crossing facts page gives the public crossings and quiet-zone shares for each state, along with national figures such as the years in which road counts were taken, and its home page lists all crossings in each state. Once a record is open, the note on reading a crossing record, field by field explains what each part of it says.

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. Rail Crossing Atlas: home page, crossings in each state. Read 3 November 2026.
2. Rail Crossing Atlas: crossing facts, public crossings and quiet-zone share by state. Read 3 November 2026.
3. Rail Crossing Atlas: railroad crossings by state. Read 3 November 2026.
4. Rail Crossing Atlas: quiet zones by state. Read 3 November 2026.
5. 49 CFR 234.403: submission of data to the crossing inventory (Cornell Legal Information Institute). Read 3 November 2026.
6. Crossing Inventory Data, Current: the FRA dataset on data.transportation.gov. Read 3 November 2026.