The evaluation of the stability of continuous welded rail (CWR) is a major area of research activity. In this paper, a method is proposed that uses finite element analysis and discrete short-time Fourier transform methods to evaluate the global and local stabilities of in-service CWR on the Baotou–Xi’an line in the People’s Republic of China. A local stability evaluation criterion for the rail and a global standard deviation for the thermal stress fluctuation in the CWR are proposed. The global stability of a CWR that consists of two rails is taken to be that of the rail with the largest thermal stress fluctuation, whereas for a single rail, the fluctuation state of the local zone with the largest thermal stress fluctuation is used as the criterion.
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