The crew scheduling of railway freight transportation is the work basis for freight locomotives operation. It is still made manually by the schedulers based on their experience in China, leading to some problems such as low efficiency of scheduling preparation, unbalanced work time of crew and waste of crew resources. In response to these problems, in this paper, a model for railway freight locomotive crew scheduling is established, with the aim of minimizing the crew idle transition time, the crew scheduling preparation process and the locomotive management regulations considered. To solve the model, the traversal searching algorithm based on “first come first serve” principle and genetic algorithm are designed. Finally, the example of two freight workshops in a locomotive depot is selected to verify that the proposed model and algorithm can effectively solve the problem. Compared with the original manual experience plan, the number of freight locomotive crew is reduced by 22.5% and 17.5%, and the efficiency of railway freight locomotive crew scheduling has been improved.