FRA Form 55: Railroad Operational Safety Metrics

The Injury/Illness Summary - Operational Source Data (Form 55) dataset contains monthly raw operational data submitted by all railroads to the Federal Railroad Administration. It includes metrics such as train miles, employee hours worked, yard switching miles, passenger counts, and passenger miles. The dataset is maintained by the Department of Transportation and replaced a legacy download system.

Use Cases

• Analyzing trends in railroad workforce safety based on reported employee hours and train miles
• Modeling operational efficiency based on monthly passenger miles and passenger counts
• Benchmarking yard switching activity across railroads based on yard switching miles

Strengths

• Data is mandated and submitted monthly by all railroads, suggesting comprehensive coverage
• The dataset is the official source data, containing raw values as reported

Limitations

• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download
• Row count is unknown, which may limit suitability assessment

Provenance

Source

Department of Transportation

Collection Method

Mandatory monthly submission by railroads on Form FRA F 6180.55

Freshness

Last updated 2026-03-26 12:48:20.934728; freshness should be verified