Keywords: railway wheels, tread braking, heat transfer, hot stops, thermal localization, inverse problems.

Non-uniform heating during tread braking leads to complex thermomechanical loading conditions and damage mechanisms.$\,$Replicating these effects numerically is challenging because the heat flux at the wheel–brake block interface cannot be measured directly and must instead be inferred from temperature data.$\,\,$To address this, the present work introduces an adjoint-based inverse heat transfer method to reconstruct the transient temperature field on a railway wheel tread subjected to prolonged drag braking.$\,$The braking heat flux is parameterized using a truncated Fourier series in the circumferential direction and a sinusoidal lateral bias across the tread.$\,$The coefficients are calibrated by minimizing the discrepancy between simulated and measured mid-tread temperatures from a brake-roller test rig.$\,$The inverse problem is formulated as a PDE-constrained optimization problem and solved efficiently using an adjoint method with checkpointing, enabling gradient-based optimization over long braking durations. The reconstructed temperature fields show good agreement with mid-tread measurements at multiple braking times, capturing the dominant circumferential temperature variations and providing a consistent basis for analyzing thermal localization under tread braking conditions.

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