Line planning is the first important strategic element in the railway operation planning process,which will directly affect the successive planning to determine the efficiency of the whole railway system.A two-layer optimization model is proposed within a simulation framework to deal with the high-speed railway (HSR) line planning problem.In the model,the top layer aims at achieving an optimal stop-schedule set with the service frequencies,and is formulated as a nonlinear program,solved by genetic algorithm.The objective of top layer is tominimize the total operation cost and unserved passenger volume.Given a specific stop-schedule,the bottom layer focuses on weighted passenger flow assignment,formulated as a mixed integer program with the objective of maximizing the served passenger volume andminimizing the total travel time for all passengers.The case study on Taiwan HSR shows that the proposed two-layer model is better than the existing techniques.In addition,this model is also illustrated with the Beijing-Shanghai HSR in China.The result shows that the two-layer optimization model can reduce computation complexity and that an optimal set of stop-schedules can always be generated with less calculation time.