Despite the global will to limit the rise in temperature to 1.5 °C [1], the devastating effects of climate change are obvious. Climate change is a fact and last IPCC assessment report [2] confirms that global warming will continue to increase over the coming decades. It will bring with it all kinds of risks: more frequent extreme weather events such as heatwaves, droughts, or floods, to coastal erosion due to rising sea levels. The impacts will affect every human activity. Railway is one of them, and as it is one of the best solutions to dramatically reduce GHG emitted by transportation [3], making it resilient is crucial. The work presented is a part of the European research project for a sustainable rail system, Europe’s Rail flagship project #4 named Rail4EARTH. The four-year project started in December 2022. This paper presents the research undertaken as part of WP2 (Work Package 2) Adaptation to Climate Change (ACC), which aims to increase the resilience of the European railway system to the current and future climate conditions. The method is to implement the EU adaptation strategy [4] to the railway sector, structured at this stage around its two first objectives ‘Smarter adaptation’ and ‘Faster adaptation’. Railway operators, infrastructures managers, train manufacturers will bring their expertise and experiences to the project: SNCF (France - Leader), ADIF (Spain), ALSTOM (France), PKP (Poland), Trafikverket (Sweden). Regarding ‘Smarter adaptation’, the objective is to develop knowledge on climate change adaptation related to the railway assets design in order to make them resilient to the predicted climate scenarios for the coming decades, as their life duration ranges from 40 years (trains) to 100 years (infrastructure). Concerning ‘Faster adaptation’, some geographical areas in the World are certainly currently facing the future climate conditions of Europe: the technical solutions already implemented for railway activities will be benchmarked.