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The prediction of the wear at the wheel–rail interface is a fundamental problem in the railway field, mainly correlated to the planning of maintenance interventions, vehicle stability and the possibility of researching specific strategies for the wheel and rail profile optimization. In this work the Authors present a model specifically developed for the evaluation of the wheel and rail profile evolution due to wear, whose layout is made up of two mutually interactive but separate units: a vehicle model for the dynamic analysis and a model for the wear estimation. The first one is made up of two parts that interact online during the dynamic simulations: a 3D multibody model of the railway vehicle implemented in Simpack Rail (a commercial software for the analysis of multibody systems) and an innovative 3D global contact model (developed by the Authors in previous works) for the detection of the contact points between wheel …