This paper treats theoretical and practical aspects of train management in freight shunting yards. It is a literature survey extending the previous ones and presenting the new important papers published in the last decade. The operations realised in such yards are formalised by modelling them in unified modelling language diagrams and the algorithms implemented to solve the optimisation problems of operations management for the different types of freight shunting yards and for the existing models are presented. The details on real yards that can be found in the literature are also reported, to allow the reader understanding what case studies can be actually tackled with the existing methods.