Assistance program
Railroad Development
$683.0 Million committed in FY2018–FY2026
- Agency
- Federal Railroad Administration, Transportation, Department of
- Assistance
- Project Grants
- CFDA number
- 20.314
- What it does
- To provide financial assistance for: planning and developing railroad corridors (including environmental studies), purchasing rail equipment, rail line relocation and improvement projects, construction projects that improve rail lines, enhance service, and add capacity to the national rail system, capital construction, rehabilitation and improvements benefiting train operations.
- Who benefits
- State governments Regional and local governments For-profit organizations, such as railroads.
- Who applies
- State governments (includes District of Columbia); Regional and Local governments (excludes institutions of higher education and hospitals); For-profit organizations, such as railroads.
- Authorized by
- Safe, Accountable, Flexible, Efficient Transportation Equity Act: A Legacy for Users (SAFETEA-LU)
- Moving Ahead for Progress in the 21st Century Act (aka - MAP-21),
- Rail Safety Improvement Act of 2008 (aka - RSIA 2008)
- Program site
- http://www.fra.dot.gov/ ↗
Committed by fiscal year
* FY2026 is year-to-date — the fiscal year is still in progress, so its total is still filling in. The striped band and dashed line mark that provisional stretch.
Top recipients
By dollars committed.
How to read these numbers
- Committed through this program
Money committed under this assistance listing (its CFDA program), counted in the year each action happened.
- How it's paid
Most programs pay out one way — a grant, or a direct payment to individuals; the flow bar only appears when a program genuinely mixes types.
- Some recipients aren't itemized
For entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare, the government reports one aggregate instead of naming tens of millions of people, so the recipient roster isn't part of the public record.
- Awards, counted once
An award count is the number of distinct awards with at least one action that year — each counted once, however many times it was amended.
- The colored bars
Every bar on this page splits by how the money moves:
Direct payments