We consider the Railway Traveling Salesman Problem. We show that this problem can be reduced to a variant of the generalized traveling salesman problem, defined on an undirected graph G = (V,E) with the nodes partitioned into clusters, which consists in finding a mini- mum cost cycle spanning a subset of nodes with the property that exactly two nodes are chosen from each cluster. We describe an exact exponen- tial time algorithm for the problem, as well we present two mixed integer programming models of the problem. Based on one of this models pro- posed, we present an efficient solution procedure based on a cutting plane algorithm. Extensive computational results for instances taken from the railroad company of the Netherlands Nederlandse Spoorwegen and involv- ing graphs with up to 2182 nodes and 38650 edges are reported.