A method for the welded joint-induced impulse detection and time delay determination of collected vibration signal is proposed based on time-frequency and correlation analyses. EEMD is first applied to denoising the collected vibration signals from axle boxes. Then, a time-frequency slice method is developed based on Time reassigned multi-synchrosqueezing transform (TMSST) to obtain impacts from joints of the turnout. The correlation coefficient between the time-frequency slices of the denoising signal and simulated signal is calculated, and the time delays of the two are then obtained for calculating the distance to be corrected. The proposed method is validated by on-site experimental data.