The history of the Department of Highway & Railway Engineering can be traced back to the Road Engineering Group of the Department of Civil Engineering of the National Central University in 1923. It is one of the oldest majors in the field of road transportation in China. After 100 years of development, it has established a national specialty with demonstration and leading role. In 2017, the discipline obtained A+ in the National Discipline Assessment of Transportation Engineering and Civil Engineering.

The department has a national-level teaching team and a national quality curriculum system as well as a National Experimental Teaching Demonstration Center, a National Virtual Simulation Experimental Teaching Center, and several provincial and ministerial key laboratories. The department is currently hiring 50 faculty members, including 1 academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, 1 Distinguished Professor of Changjiang Scholars, 1 Scientific and Technological Talent of the Ministry of Transportation, 1 National Natural Science Foundation of China Youth Fund, 1 Young and Middle-aged Talents in Transportation.

The talent training of the department emphasizes the combination of theory and practice, with equal emphasis on scientific research and engineering. The focus is on China's national economic development and homeland security basic security needs, the need for high-precision construction of a modern integrated transportation infrastructure system, the strategy of a powerful transportation country, and the development of major national policies such as the “the belt and road”, based on mathematics, mechanics, structure and materials. By combining the development connotation of humanities, planning, landscape, design, closely related to the modern development needs of artificial intelligence, big data, information technology, we are herein to cultivate top talents and industry leaders in road engineering, who are able to work in the field of road engineering, planning, design, construction, testing, supervision, research and teaching.

The construction of the department closely combines the characteristics of national transportation construction, and solves the key technical problems encountered in the modern road construction and management system through basic theory and engineering application research. In the past 30 years, the department has participated in the completion and renovation of tens of thousands of kilometers of roads. Our researchers have undertaken more than 200 national and provincial-level scientific research projects, applied for more than 300 national invention patents, published more than 1,000 academic papers and more than 30 textbooks, and won more than 50 scientific research awards, among which more than 10 items were awarded at national-, provincial- and ministerial-level.