The paper considers a railway timetable related problem in a simplified form, generated by the delay of one or several incoming trains at a given station. These incoming train delays are either automatically generated or manually entered. Usually there are connecting trains in the timetable, especially in up to date periodic timetables and thus incoming delays might indicate the necessity of introducing a delay with connecting outgoing trains. A hierarchical fuzzy rule base is applied in order to determine the optimal outgoing delay, taking also usual restrictions into consideration. The delays of the incoming trains are modeled by independent exponential distributions and a software simulation is built around the existing rule base. The behavior of the hierarchical fuzzy rule base and the pertinence of the outgoing delay is a subject of further investigation. The delays are also updated periodically that makes the recalculation of outgoing delays necessary from time to time. ¹ © 2009 IEEE.