Car-truck stands are used during maintenance operations to support one end of a freight car or a commuter car used in railway industry. Usually, they consists of several pieces of steel tubes and other steel members welded together to form a rigid frame structure. From a safety perspective, the car-truck stands are to be designed carefully, but at the same time due to their possible large volume of production, this structure needs to be optimized from strength and cost perspectives besides other parameters such as long life, etc. The purpose of this paper is to conduct virtual experiments for the optimal design of a different car-truck stand structures using Autodesk Simulation program as a CAE tool. The idea is to include this work as a part of final project in a traditional finite element analysis (FEA) course taught at Kettering University. For the work reported here, the structural steel members are simplified by using standard pipe sections, which are then optimized for strength and weight reduction, as well as for buckling. It is hoped that through this study a clear understanding of assumptions made in the FEA course topic on frames is realized by the students. Initial assessment done indicates that students appreciated the use of a CAE tool for optimal design of frames and other structural members.