The invention discloses a thermal treatment method of high-carbon steel railway wheels, which is implemented as follows: heating workpieces of wheels to 830-850 DEG C to carry out air cooling normalizing treatment after a forging press rolling procedure and an isothermy procedure; and protecting wheel disk covering fireproof materials during the subsequent quenching and heating; firstly heating the fireproof materials to 710-740 DEG C, and keeping the temperature for 90 minutes to anneal in two phase areas so that carbides are partially nodulized to acquire few granular pearlite tissues; subsequently placing the wheels into a holding furnace with the furnace temperature of 910-930 DEG C to keep the temperature for 40 minutes so as to quench; and finally carrying out tempering treatment at500+/-10 DEG C. By adopting the technical scheme, the impact flexibility of the wheel disks of the wheels can be obviously improved, the intensity of the wheel disks of the wheels can be effectively reduced, and meanwhile, the impact toughness and fracture toughness are obviously improved on the premise of ensuring the rim intensity and the hardness of high-carbon steel wheels to be invariable soas to effectively improve the integral performance of the high-carbon steel wheels and ensure safe use of the product.