us_trains — Historical GTFS of the US railroad network (1840–1870)

An HGTFS (Historical General Transit Feed Specification) reconstruction of the United States railroad network across six snapshot years — 1840, 1845, 1850, 1855, 1861, 1870 — built from the Railroads and the Making of Modern America (RRMMA) historical GIS dataset, University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

Published by Open History Map.

The feed

hgtfs/ (also packaged as hgtfs.zip) is a valid GTFS feed that uses the HGTFS temporal extensions — every entity carries date_opened with uncertainty brackets, routes are route_type = 1405 (Steam railway), and the network's growth is encoded as a dated graph in network_edges.txt.

file	rows	role
agency.txt	995	period operators (one per chartered line)
routes.txt	995	steam-railway routes, route_type=1405
stops.txt	4,617	graph nodes + Southern depots, with date_opened* brackets
network_edges.txt	3,142	the dated network graph (one edge per segment)
trips.txt / stop_times.txt	1,102 / 3,667	representative reconstructed service (time_accuracy=1)
shapes.txt	434,010 pts	route geometry
historical_sources.txt, route_operators.txt, events.txt	2 / 995 / 6	HGTFS provenance & context
calendar.txt, feed_info.txt	—	observation window 1840–1870

Network growth (cumulative edges existing by year)

1840	1845	1850	1855	1861	1870
475	675	1,488	1,922	2,566	3,142

Reproduce

python3 build_hgtfs.py        # needs GDAL's ogr2ogr on PATH

The generator reads the two source files in this repo — USrailshps.zip and South_Depots.kml — and writes hgtfs/ + hgtfs.zip. It is pure Python (stdlib only) apart from ogr2ogr. See HGTFS.md for the full source→HGTFS field mapping and modelling decisions.

Caveats (please read)

• Schedules are reconstructed structure, not archival timetables. RRMMA has no timetables; stop_times are derived from along-track distance at a fixed era speed and flagged time_accuracy = 1 (estimated).
• Depots cover the US South only; elsewhere a trip has just its terminal nodes.
• date_closed is empty everywhere — HGTFS asks that closure be asserted only with positive evidence, which the snapshots don't provide.
• The modern successor company (RROWNER1, e.g. CSX) is kept only in agency_note; it never stands in for the period operator.

Attribution & licence

Source geography © the RRMMA project (W. G. Thomas et al., University of Nebraska-Lincoln, https://railroads.unl.edu/) — see their terms for reuse of the underlying data. The HGTFS conversion code (build_hgtfs.py) and the derived feed are released by Open History Map; add a LICENSE file to set explicit terms.