Railroad classes
national classification of railways
Railroad classes are the system by which freight railroads are designated in the United States. Railroads are assigned to Class I, II or III according to annual revenue criteria originally set by the Surface Transportation Board in 1992. With annual adjustments for inflation, the 2019 thresholds were US$504,803,294 for Class I carriers and US$40,384,263 for Class II carriers. (Smaller carriers were Class III by default.)
There are six Class I freight railroad companies in the United States: BNSF Railway, CSX Transportation, Canadian National Railway, CPKC, Norfolk Southern Railway, and Union Pacific Railroad. Canadian National also operates in Canada and CPKC operates in Canada and Mexico.
In addition, the national passenger railroad in the United States, Amtrak, would qualify as Class I if it were a freight carrier, as would Canada's Via Rail passenger service. Mexico's Ferromex freight railroad would also qualify as Class I, but it does not operate in the United States.
Background
Initially (in 1911) the former federal agency Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) classified railroads by their annual gross revenue. Class I railroads had an annual operating revenue of at least $1 million, while Class III railroad incomes were under $100,000. Railroads in both classes were subject to reporting requirements on a quarterly or annual schedule.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 24, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1428122. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1992, 2019 and 1911.
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This entry incorporates text from “Railroad classes” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.