Global CBTC Projects Database
11 US and 10 international deployments in one table, with the fields a business case or a benchmark slide actually needs. Every value traces to the manuscript or to a case study on this site. Where a field could not be verified it is left blank rather than filled with something plausible — a reference table people cite is worth more with honest gaps than with confident guesses.
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What's inside
- 21 deployments: 11 US, 10 international benchmarks.
- Supplier and platform per line, including who owns each platform after the 2021 and 2024 mergers.
- GoA level, opening or conversion date, route length, station count and peak headway or throughput where known.
- A note per row carrying the fact that makes the entry worth citing — contract value, cutover approach, ridership.
- CSV alongside the PDF, so the rows go straight into your own analysis.
- Blank cells that mean unverified, stated explicitly rather than implied.
What this is and is not
It is a curated benchmark set, not a census. There are several hundred CBTC lines in service worldwide, and the large majority of the recent ones are in China — Beijing and Shanghai alone account for a scale of deployment no Western network approaches. What this table covers is the set of systems a US engineer is actually asked about in a design review or a board presentation: the domestic deployments, and the international ones that get cited as precedent.
The blank cells are deliberate. It would have been easy to fill every column — station counts and headways are guessable within a plausible range, and nobody would immediately notice. But the value of a reference table is that a reader can quote a cell without checking it, and that only holds if every filled cell is real. Blank means unverified, not zero.
The comparison that matters most
Put Paris Line 14 and Paris Line 1 next to each other. Same city, same operator, same supplier, both at GoA 4 — and completely different projects. Line 14 opened greenfield in 1998 with platform screen doors from the first day. Line 1 was converted under traffic between 2007 and 2012, with PSDs retrofitted to 86 percent of platforms over five years, at €700M+ on an existing railway carrying 1.5 million people a day. The greenfield number is the one vendors quote. The brownfield number is the one a US agency should budget against.
Sources & method
Compiled from Communications-Based Train Control, Volumes 1 and 2 (Chapters 10 and 11), by Chunjun (Francisco) Wang, and the case-study articles on cbtcbook.com. An empty cell means the value could not be verified against those sources; it does not mean zero. Headways are peak, per direction. This is a curated benchmark set, not a complete census of CBTC deployments worldwide.