Railway track monitoring has been a critical issue, recently. Therefore, several new methods have been proposed so far to the track authorities. Here, in this paper, application of smart sleeper to detect railway track defects has been studied using wheel drop test with different drop height and hanging sleeper defect. A numerical model of wheel drop test is developed for further study of different hanging heights. Different drop height of 20 and 50 mm are studied with and without hanging defect. The vibration response of track panel and self-sensing response of smart sleeper are recorded and compared. Smart railway sleeper studied in this research is developed using smart self-sensing concrete. The mould used to implement smart railway sleeper is a mono block reinforced concrete sleeper. The results show that the outer electrodes have a significant change in self-sensing response due to hanging sleeper defect compared with inner electrode results. The self-sensing response for 20 and 50 mm drop height increase by 50%, and the ratios of change for outer electrodes remain as 2.03. The maximum acceleration peaks of 70 mm drop height for full ballast support increases by 36% and 5% for hanging defect and crackled sleepers, respectively. The maximum acceleration values obtained as 121, 189, and 127 m/s2 for full ballast support, hanging defect and cracked sleeper. The significant increase due to hanging defect can be detected by smart sleeper self-sensing response.