Abstract: To investigate the non-uniform temperature field caused by solar radiation and its effect on railway suspension bridge, a method is proposed in this paper to calculate the non-uniform temperature field of bridge components caused by shading among different components. By taking the node temperature obtained from the heat conduction as the boundary condition, the effects of the main truss displacement caused by the non-uniform temperature are calculated. Taking a new railway suspension bridge as an example, the coupled thermo-mechanical model is used to analyze the time-space changing spectrum of the temperature field and its effect on the railway suspension bridge. The accuracy and applicability of the proposed method are verified by comparing the simulated results of temperature and displacement with the measured data. The results show that it is feasible to calculate the non-uniform temperature field and analyze its effect on truss suspension bridge by the proposed method. At the same time, the temperature field of the truss suspension bridge has the characteristics of periodicity and non-uniformity, and the temperature variation of the bridge components lags slightly behind that of the environment. Due to the influence of sunshine shadow and different thermal parameters of materials, non-uniform temperature field is generated among components. The temperature effect on steel suspension bridge is affected by ambient temperature. The short-period effect is mainly caused by sunshine radiation and diurnal temperature difference, which results in non-uniform temperature field of main truss. The long period effect is mainly due to the seasonal temperature change, which causes the overall temperature change of the structure. Both the numerical results and the measured data show that there is a significant difference between the overall temperature model and the non-uniform temperature field model. In order to better maintain the bridge alignment and the high speed train operating performance, the influence of sunshine non-uniformity on the temperature field and its effect should be considered for long-span suspension bridges.