Smart maintenance is essential to achieving a safe and reliable railway, but traditional maintenance deployment is costly and heavily human-involved. Ineffective job execution or failure in preventive maintenance can lead to railway service disruption and unsafe operations. The deployment of robotic and autonomous systems was proposed to conduct these maintenance tasks with higher accuracy and reliability. In order for these systems to be capable of detecting rail flaws along millions of mileages they must register their location with higher accuracy. A prerequisite of an autonomous vehicle is its possessing a high degree of accuracy in terms of its positional awareness. This paper first reviews the importance and demands of preventive maintenance in railway networks and the related techniques. Furthermore, this paper investigates the strategies, techniques, architecture, and references used by different systems to resolve the location along the railway network. Additionally, this paper discusses the advantages and applicability of on-board-based and infrastructure-based sensing, respectively. Finally, this paper analyses the uncertainties which contribute to a vehicle’s position error and influence on positioning accuracy and reliability with corresponding technique solutions. This study therefore provides an overall direction for the development of further autonomous track-based system designs and methods to deal with the challenges faced in the railway network.