Failure of railway signal equipment can cause an impact on its normal operation, and it is necessary to make a timely diagnosis of the failure. In this study, the data of a railway bureau from 2016 to 2020 were studied as an example. Firstly, denoising and feature extraction were performed on the data; then the Adaptive Comprehensive Oversampling (ADASYN) method was used to synthesize minority class samples; finally, three algorithms, back-propagation neural network (BPNN), support vector machine (SVM) and C4.5 algorithms, were used for failure diagnosis. It was found that the three algorithms performed poorly in diagnosing the original data but performed significantly better in diagnosing the synthesized samples, among which the BPNN algorithm had the best performance. The average precision, recall rate and F1 score of the BPNN algorithm were 0.94, 0.92 and 0.93, respectively. The results verify the effectiveness of the BPNN algorithm for failure diagnosis, and the algorithm can be further promoted and applied in practice.