One of the main causes of severe wear or crack initiation in wheel and rail is the contact stress due to wheel-rail contact. First, we obtain contact stress due to the rail mounting slope using the finite element method. Second, the shape design based on more reasonable contact stress analysis rather th~n a general Hertzian contact theory is investigated in order to reduce the contact stress. The optimum -design is performed using the simple 2-D finite element model and its results are verified by 311) finite element analysis.