A wireless monitoring network is an effective way to monitor and transmit information about railway infrastructure conditions. Its lifetime is significantly affected by the energy usage among all sensors. This paper proposes a novel cluster-based valid lifetime maximization protocol (CVLMP) to extend the lifetime of the network. In the CVLMP, the cluster heads (CHs) are selected and rotated with the selection probability and energy information. Then, the clusters are determined around the CHs based on the multi-objective optimization model, which minimizes the total energy consumption and balances the consumption among all CHs. Finally, the multi-objective model is solved by an improved nondominated sorting genetic algorithm II. The simulation results show that, compared with two other strategies in the prior literature, our proposed CVLMP can effectively extend the valid lifetime of the network as well as increase the inspected data packets received at the sink node.