Control of railway systems takes place in a complex, real-time and dynamically changing environment. This paper deals with distributed real-time control of crossings in a railway system. The current adopted software engineering techniques (e.g. artificial intelligence) are not able to couple with real-time constraints due to its nature undeterministic behavior. Therefore, this paper proposes the usage of a novel agent-based real-time approach. The detailed agent-based control scheme is presented in this paper focusing on the agent-algorithm development and its implementation under the real-time operating system RTAI (real time application interface). Moreover, the complete architecture of railway system model (hardware and software) used for the case study is also presented