The CTA Railroad Network is a representation of the North American railroad system that contains every railroad route in the US, Canada, and Mexico that has been active since 1993. It is intended for logical network programming, traffic analyses, and mapping applications. Corporate structure, a key to the simulation of routing, is explicitly temporal, allowing historical studies and comparisons. Supporting data on interlines and corporate ancestry allow the construction of routable networks for a specific target date. The network is an extension of the Federal Railroad Administration's strategic network.
The network is distributed in two versions:
Major differences from the documentation incorporated into edition 55 (2005 May):
View documentation Description of the CTA Railroad Network
(ASCII text 53 KB)
View maps which illustrate network features
Download raw network QN83
| QN83R
in native format (7.2 MB)
|
QN83V
in shapefile format (3.8 MB)
|
Download current operational network QC83
| QC83R
in native format (3.1 MB) |
QC83V
in shapefile format (3.2 MB) |
Download supporting
data: Interlines, Railroad ancestry, Subdivision list (0.2 MB compressed)
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View railroad reporting marks and ancestry,
wconv.txt, only.
Supporting programs:
RHA (re-format), RQCFS (operational network construction), Arc/Info
loading macros.
Download source and executables in a single
zipped file (28 KB) ![]()
GIS details: Geographic accuracy is generally 100 m on active US lines (equivalent to a scale of 1:100,000), but is object-specific (see documentation). The geographic coordinate system is decimal degrees, datum NAD27. No ESRI PRJ file is included with the shapefiles, but if there were, it would look like this (cut and paste if needed):
GEOGCS["GCS_North_American_1927",DATUM["D_North_American_1927",SPHEROID["Clarke_1866",6378206.4,294.9786982]],PRIMEM["Greenwich",0],UNIT["Degree",0.017453292519943295]]
Several royalty-free
shapefile viewers are available on the Web that you can use to make
on-screen maps of this network. Possibilities include:
You will have to install the program and point it to the downloaded shapefiles
on your computer.
CTA Transportation Networks - Home Page