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Railway turnouts or switches and crossings (S&C) are vital components within railway infrastructure which provide flexibility to enable trains to switch from one track to another. However, such flexibility requires certain degree of geometry changes and discontinuities in the switch and crossing panels. Because of the difference in geometry and discontinuities, high contact forces often arise when the wheel is in contact with them, resulting in contact surface damage, material fatigue, noise, and vibration to the surrounding environment, etc. As a result, optimization of S&C has been a popular topic in the recent years. Nevertheless, most of the optimization works carried out are either not considering switch and crossing as a whole, or neglecting the track dynamic. Using recently developed train-turnout model with high efficiency in the commercially available multi-body simulation software, GENSYS, an optimisation methodology considering a full 3-dimensional numerical S&C model incorporated with optimisation technique namely genetic algorithm (GA) is proposed. A detailed description of the methodology is presented. The methodology is then tested by studying a S&C and the results of the simulations alongside with the discussions are presented in the paper.