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With the aim of supporting the process of adapting railway infrastructure to present and future traffic needs, we have developed a method to build train timetables efficiently. In this work, we describe the problem in terms of constraints derived from railway infrastructure, user requirements and traffic constraints, and we propose a method to solve it efficiently. This method carries out the search by assigning values to variables in a given order and verifying the satisfaction of constraints where these are involved. When a constraint is not satisfied, a guided backtracking is done. The technique reduces the search space allowing us to solve real and complex problems efficiently.