Romania’s level crossings: how many passenger trains cut across each road, hour by hour

#Where the road waits most often

OpenStreetMap shows 5,376 places in Romania where a road crosses a railway at the same level. On an ordinary Wednesday, 4 November 2026, at least one passenger train passes 3,272 of them; half of those see 14 trains or fewer. The other 2,104 sit on freight, industrial or closed lines.

The trains bunch on one corridor. All ten of the busiest crossings in the country lie between Bucharest and Ploiești, 60 km to the north, on the main line to Brașov and to Moldavia in the north-east. The first two are Strada Soldat Neagoe Teodor and Strada Marmurei in Bucharest, where the road crosses the whole bundle of lines leaving the North Station to the north-west at once: 325 trains a day each. Then come Bărcănești, Brazi, Tinosu, Buftea, Periș, Poienarii Burchii and Crevedia, with 196–200 each. Street names are given in Romanian: Strada is street, Șoseaua is road; DJ marks a county road and DN a national road.

#The busiest level crossings

Passenger trains on a Wednesday (4 November 2026) and a Saturday (7 November 2026). The daily wait is a calculation, not a measurement: how long the road would wait if the crossing had an automatic barrier, using the range CFR, the state rail infrastructure company, gives: 50 to 154 seconds per train. “–” means OpenStreetMap records neither barrier nor signals there.

#The busiest crossing in each county

Passenger trains on a Wednesday through the busiest level crossing of each of Romania’s 41 counties and Bucharest.

#How long the road waits

A timetable says when a train passes, not how long the road stays shut. For automatic barriers CFR gave a figure in an official reply published by the news site G4Media in 2018: the wait is “a minimum of 50 seconds, a maximum of 154 seconds”.

The page applies that range to every train: the road is shut from the moment the barrier comes down until 15 seconds after the train has passed, and trains that come close together merge into one wait. On those figures, the road at the two Bucharest crossings would wait between 4.2 and 11.4 hours a day, if they have automatic barriers (OpenStreetMap does not say). Even if every crossing in the country had one, only 2 would be shut for four hours a day or more at 50 seconds per train, and 23 at 154 seconds; OpenStreetMap confirms a barrier at only 5 of those 23.

Most crossings have no barrier at all. According to figures published by the news channel Digi24, in 2021 Romania had 5,025 level crossings: 252 with automatic barriers, 436 with manual barriers, 888 with lights and bells only, and the rest with road signs only. CFR’s 2024 Network Statement counts 1,195 automatic signalling systems at level crossings. OpenStreetMap records the protection of only 751 of the 5,376 crossings on the map. So the waiting minutes here are a what-if, “if this crossing had an automatic barrier”, not a measurement. Where OpenStreetMap records neither barrier nor signals, the road waits only while the train passes.

CFR’s figure is not always what drivers live with. In November 2018, at the crossing on Șoseaua Petricani in Bucharest (barrier-protected, according to OpenStreetMap), a G4Media reporter timed ten minutes with the barrier down for a light engine and one local train: nearly four times CFR’s 154-second maximum.

#What is missing: freight trains and more

Freight timetables are not public, so every number here counts passenger trains only. One crossing has a figure that includes freight: for Șoseaua Petricani, CFR said in 2018 that “an average of 50 trains in 24 hours” pass. The 2025–26 timetable sends 54 passenger trains through it on a Wednesday, mostly those to Constanța on the Black Sea coast and to Fundulea, a town 40 km east of Bucharest. The figures are from different years, so they cannot say how many freight trains come on top.

The public timetable file lacks the trains of the operator Regio Călători between Timișoara and Jimbolia, although they run (the gap was found while building a page on stations); crossings on that line show fewer trains than they get. Trains replaced by buses are not counted. The timetable is the plan: delays, cancellations and engineering works do not show.

The page does not check whether a bridge or underpass nearby lets drivers go round. Nor can it rule out errors in OpenStreetMap: a crossing may have been closed or moved, and some “crossings” are only farm tracks or footpaths.

The 2025–26 timetable runs until 12 December 2026. The page will be rebuilt on the timetable that starts on 13 December.

#Method

For 4 November 2026, a Wednesday, and 7 November 2026, a Saturday, the page takes every passenger train in the 2025–26 timetable of all operators: 1,730 trains on the Wednesday and 1,509 on the Saturday. Between two stops, each train is sent along the shortest route over the OpenStreetMap tracks; the time it passes each level crossing is set in proportion to the distance between the two stops. Of 23,214 stop-to-stop legs, 50 could not be traced on the map.

OpenStreetMap nodes less than 40 metres apart count as one crossing (a road over a double track has one node on each track): 8,015 nodes become 5,376 crossings. Each crossing gets the town or commune it lies in, from official boundaries, and the name of the road across it.

A check on held-out data: for 1,500 intermediate stops picked at random, the stop was removed and the train routed straight between its neighbours. In 94.8% of cases the route passes within 300 metres of the removed stop (median: 44 metres). The computed time differs from the timetable by 0.9 minutes in the middle case and by at most 3.4 minutes in nine cases out of ten. The misses are mostly at large stations, whose map point lies away from the tracks.

The daily wait is not measured: it is the number of trains multiplied by CFR’s 50–154 second range, with trains close together merged into one wait.

Download the table of all crossings (CSV)

Columns: OpenStreetMap node id, road, town or commune, county, coordinates, protection according to OpenStreetMap, Wednesday and Saturday trains, busiest hour and estimated wait.

#Sources

• 2025–26 timetable for every operator in GTFS format (Vasile Coțovanu’s export of the Informatică Feroviară files on data.gov.ro)
• Timetable files on data.gov.ro (Informatică Feroviară SA, the state rail IT company)
• OpenStreetMap: railway lines, level crossings and roads, extract of 30 October 2026 (Geofabrik, ODbL licence)
• Boundaries of Romania’s 3,181 towns and communes (geo-spatial.org, from the land agency ANCPI) and the SIRUTA place register, first half of 2026 (National Institute of Statistics)
• G4Media, 3 November 2018: CFR’s official reply on waiting times at automatic barriers and on the Șoseaua Petricani crossing (in Romanian)
• Digi24, 14 September 2021: level crossings by type of protection and crashes over five years, from CFR and the police (in Romanian)
• CFR SA, 2024 Network Statement, annex 5: main characteristics of the network