This paper considers the rail crane scheduling problem which is defined as determining the sequence of loading/unloading container on/from a freight train. The objective is to minimize the weighted sum of the range of order completion time and makespan. The range of order completion time implies the difference between the maximum of completion time and minimum of start time of each customer order consisting of jobs. Makespan refers to the time when all the jobs are completed. In a rail freight terminal, logistics firms as a customer wish to reduce the range of their order completion time. To develop a methodology for the crane scheduling, we formulate the problem as a mixed integer program and develop three metaheuristics, namely, genetic algorithm, simulated annealing, and tabu search. To validate the effectiveness of heuristic algorithms, computational experiments are done based on a set of real life data. Results of the experiments show that heuristic algorithms give good solutions for small-size and large-size problems in terms of solution quality and computation time.