Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) Safety Data APIs - Pilot


Department of Transportation          Federal Railroad Administration

To improve access to data and encourage innovation, the Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) has begun to provide API access to some data sets, beginning with the Rail Equipment Accident/Incident Report (Form 54) and Highway-Rail Grade Crossing Accident/Incident Report (Form 57). We invite developers to use these APIs and provide feedback to help us move forward with continued API development.

Please read the Terms of Service for using the API.

Rail Equipment Accident/Incident Report (Form 54) API

This Application Protocol Interface (API) has been created by the Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) for use by developers and interested parties to provide reportable rail equipment accident data. This web service enables registered users to consume reportable rail equipment accident data by railroad and year using methods other than those available on the current safetydata.fra.dot.gov website. To register for an account, please contact us.

Highway-Rail Grade Crossing Accident/Incident Report (Form 57) API

This Application Protocol Interface (API) has been created by the Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) for use by developers and interested parties to provide reportable data for accidents that occur between railroad on-track equipment and a highway user at a highway-rail grade crossing site. This web service enables registered users to consume reportable data for accidents that occur at highway-rail grade crossings by railroad and year using methods other than those available on the current safetydata.fra.dot.gov website. To register for an account, please contact us.

FRA Lite API Service

FRA Lite API Service contains methods for downloading data for RSIS Mobile. To register for an account, please contact us.

Accessing Data
Data is accessible to software developers through a stateless HTTP GET request. In order to access data, you will need to insert a username and password into the request URL in order for query results to be returned. If you do not have an account assigned to you, you will need to contact us to register for one.

Query Response
The response for all queries is formatted as xml where the data values are enclosed in the tag format.

An example query response looks like this:

<"IYR">11<"/IYR">
<"IMO">04<"/IMO">
<"RAILROAD">CSX<"/RAILROAD">
<"INCDTNO">040611<"/INCDTNO">

Each query response will be either XMLDocument or SOAP header Error.

Sample Response