Digitalization in railway maintenance opens new avenues for decision-making and maintenance actions. Advanced sensors and support systems help in automating railway maintenance operations, but this also brings new challenges. Dealing with huge amount of data, transparency and observability are becoming critical aspects in the digitalized word. Successively influence the human ability to gain Situation Awareness, which is considered as important human cognitive aspect for decision-making. The study elaborates the opportunities and challenges of digitalization, in a Situation Awareness perspective. Review of present studies shows that although digitalization is meant to increase: Situation Awareness is often challenged and, sometimes even hindered. Therefore, the major focus is on making recommendations using proper Situation Awareness interventions for meeting the emerging challenges of digitalization on the railway maintenance, so as to provide a better awareness about the railway systems they are dealing with. © 2021, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.