Railways Blog

On August 29th, 2024 we at Esri hosted a webinar focused on how Short Line railroads can get started, and get productive, with ArcGIS.  We discussed how to start building your GIS database using data published by the ArcGIS Living Atlas and by the US Dept of Transportation's Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) mapping portal.

This article describes how a Python script can be written that measures railroad track curvature. It discusses how it works, some considerations for running it, along with a link to the script itself.

This article provides a clear step-by-step set of instructions for using railroad line symbols in web maps using the ArcGIS Online Map Viewer.

Join this webinar to explore ready-to-use data quality checks for the Linear Referencing System (LRS) network and learn validation methods and best practices for linear referenced features.

Intended for database administrators as recommendations for establishing the product workspaces in an Enterprise Geodatabase (Oracle®, SQL Server®, PostgreSQL®).

Mapping & Charting Solutions (MCS) Enterprise Databases Best Practices

Intended for database administrators as recommendations for establishing the product workspaces in an Enterprise Geodatabase (Oracle®, SQL Server®, PostgreSQL®).

At the recent Esri Rail Summit in November 2023, the initial version of the ArcGIS Railroads Data Model was released. After initial feedback from several sources from our user community, this data model has been updated for 2024.

Did you know you can use ArcGIS Roads and Highways location referencing just as easily and powerfully with railroad networks and you can with road networks?

Whether you're maintaining your own track charts or creating interactive maps for field use, visualizing your railroad network as a schematic diagram can come in handy. Let's explore how we can use ArcGIS tools for creating and maintaining railroad schematic diagram maps.

We're Back!

We at Esri are all pretty excited about this year's conference--back in person after 3 long years. We hope you are too! It's going to be great to meet up, discuss, and learn things in-person--not to mention spending a few days in and around San Diego. 

Digital Access

For those of your who are not able to attend, it's great that we've learned a lot of lessons over the past few years of virtual events, and will be offering Digital Access to a good bit of it.

Rail Sessions and Activities UC22 Flyer   (printable PDF)

Check out the flyer, linked above, for a quick glance guide of all of the activity planned for the Esri UC related to the use of ArcGIS by railroads.

The flyer covers a bunch of tech sessions we think you'll like, as well as Sunday's Transportation Social and Wednesday morning's Rail SIG (special interest group) meeting!