Keywords: continuous welded rail, stress-free temperature, neutral temperature, target neutral temperature, spatial interpolation, inverse distance weighting, clusters unifying through hiding interpolation, climatological data, geospatial analysis.

A methodology is proposed to design target neutral temperature of continuous welded rail when direct rail-temperature measurements are unavailable. The approach relies exclusively on historical ambient-temperature records from Mexican climatological stations and a linear relationship between rail and ambient temperatures. Extreme ambient temperatures are spatially interpolated along the railway alignment using the Clusters Unifying Through Hiding Interpolation method. The resulting continuous surface of target neutral temperature is then discretised into uniform segments suitable for construction planning. The methodology is applied to a 100.6km railway alignment in north-eastern Mexico, using records from 15 climatological stations within a 25km buffer. Results show that the target neutral temperature varies between 33.4 and 35.0C along the alignment. A discretisation interval of 0.5C yields five segments with four distinct values, offering a practical balance between thermal resolution and construction feasibility. A comparison between classic Inverse Distance Weighting and the Clusters Unifying Through Hiding Interpolation variant confirms that differences are below 0.5C, validating the robustness of the interpolation. The proposed desk-based methodology provides a practical and reproducible tool for the early design stages of railway projects where field instrumentation is not yet available.

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