A Sentinel-2 dataset for railway presence classification across metropolitan France

This article presents a Sentinel-2 image dataset for railway presence classification across metropolitan France. The collection contains 10,000 true-color RGB PNG chips with equal representation of railway and railway-absent scenes. Each chip has dimensions of 224 × 224 pixels and covers a ground footprint of 512 m × 512 m. Railway chip locations were derived from retained OpenStreetMap railway=rail geometries. The railway class was constructed through geographically balanced sampling along the retained network and distance thinning between selected locations. Railway-absent chips were generated in the local surroundings of railway locations. A railway-absent chip was included only when its complete footprint did not intersect retained railway geometries and did not overlap an already accepted chip footprint. The image collection was generated from Copernicus Sentinel-2 Level-2A observations acquired by the Sentinel-2 satellite constellation. Bands B04, B03 and B02 were used to create the red, green and blue image channels. Retrieval covered the period from 23 June 2025 to 23 June 2026 and applied a maximum cloud-cover threshold of 10 percent together with least-cloud-cover mosaicking. The included files comprise the image collection and a CSV metadata table containing image filenames, class labels and stable candidate identifiers. The dataset provides material for railway-presence classification, comparison of image-classification architectures, spatial evaluation designs, and geospatial representation-learning workflows.