Is there a way to look up railroad crossing train times?

My railroad is Amtrak and can sometimes run 45 minutes to and hour late. Good luck with avoiding crossing by calculating when they’ll be at a crossing.

Yes and no.

If it’s a commuter railroad, like in Boston or parts of NY, NJ or Connecticut, then the trains run on a set schedule, and they’re usually on time or within a minute or two. These systems run trains on a 20–30 minute interval, so it’s important that they keep to some sort of a schedule.

If you’re talking freight railroads (pretty much the rest of the country), then the answer is No. The railroads do have schedules, but they’re practically never public, and they’re subject to change, and so on. There’s one railroad that dispatches trains on a 28-hour schedule instead of a 24-hour schedule in order to save money.

So .. depending on where you live, there may be a schedule or there may not be….

…and even so, all sorts of things happen to disrupt schedules. I have ridden Amtrak a few times. They use track owned by freight transporters. If one has a delay, there can be a domino effect.