Mapping Climate Extremes and Infrastructure Vulnerability: A New Database for U.S. Railroads

This study presents a new national dataset that assigns historical natural hazard events-flooding, excessive heat, and landslides-to the U.S. railroad network, applying spatial analysis to federal agency data. Existing datasets, such as the Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) accident records, only capture reportable accidents and miss less severe but still disruptive hazard exposures. To address this gap, multiple federal databases were integrated to link extreme natural hazard events to railroad infrastructure, while the FRA accident dataset was used solely for verification as a reference dataset. The verification step showed that up to 50% of hazard-linked accidents occurred on the same date as a recorded hazard event, supporting the spatial-temporal accuracy of the dataset. The resulting dataset provides railroad segment-level assignments of hazard exposure across the continental U.S. from 2000 to 2024. It serves as a baseline for understanding infrastructure vulnerability and is designed for use in academic research, planning, and climate resilience assessments related to transportation infrastructure.