China has made great achievements in railway construction since its founding over 70 years ago. Particularly, China’s highspeed railway industry has developed rapidly and become a beautiful national business card over the past 15 years. Steel structures play an irreplaceable and critical role in railway development and are widely applied in long-span railway steel bridges and roof trusses of railway stations. This research reviews and prospects the development of railway steel structures. It reviews the development of railway steel structures from the perspective of material, structure, and project scale, and proposes the development trends of the railway steel structures, namely, lightweight, assembly, informatization, strong durability, and high tenacity. Moreover, the focuses of future development of the railway steel structures are summarized in terms of design, construction, maintenance, and material. The diversification of application areas and environments has posed a series of technical challenges for the railway steel structure development, including weather resistant design, construction in harsh marine environment, and lack of maintenance in plateau environment, which all require persistent and further research.
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Liu et al. (2020) studied this question.