The Department of Urban Rail Transit was established in 2008. Currently, it has a faculty of 19 members, including 6 professors, 11 associate professors, and 2 lecturers. Both the teaching and research teams have been recognized as university-level outstanding teams.

The department is responsible for the Urban Rail Transit undergraduate program and for cultivating master and doctoral postgraduates in disciplines such as Transportation Planning and Management, Systems Engineering, Urban Traffic Engineering, and Comprehensive Transportation. It has developed nearly 20 courses and teaching materials, among which 2 are national-level elite courses, and has published 5 national planning textbooks and ministry/provincial-level excellent textbooks. Faculty members have been awarded the Beijing Municipal Teaching Master Award and the BaoSteel Excellent Teacher Award, each once. Under their supervision, undergraduate students have won 2 national-level awards and 2 ministry/provincial-level awards. The department has cultivated a large number of high-level professionals for national and provincial transportation departments, research institutes, universities, consulting agencies, as well as urban rail transit planning, design, and operation units.

Since its establishment, the department has undertaken over 30 projects including those under the National 973 Program, major projects, key projects, general projects, and youth projects of the National Natural Science Foundation of China, sub-projects of the National 863 Program, along with 5 international collaborative projects and hundreds of enterprise service projects. It has received multiple national and provincial/ministerial-level awards for scientific research and teaching. The department is responsible for organizing Journal of Transportation Systems Engineering and Information Technology and the China Transportation Leaders Forum.

In recent years, within the fields of urban rail transit and comprehensive transportation, the department has achieved a substantial number of research results applied in practical transportation industry production. It has also submitted a series of transportation policy recommendations to national-level decision-making bodies.