Railway tracks detection and turnouts recognition are the basic tasks in driver assistance systems, which can determine the interesting regions for detecting obstacles and signals. In this paper, a novel railway tracks detection and turnouts recognition method using HOG (Histogram of Oriented Gradients) features was presented. At first, the approach computes HOG features and establishes integral images, and then extracts railway tracks by region-growing algorithm. Then based on recognizing the open direction of the turnout, we find the path where the train will travel through. Experiments demonstrated that our method was able to correctly extract tracks and recognize turnouts even in very bad illumination conditions and run fast enough for practical use. In addition, our approach only needs a computer and a cheap camera installed in the railroad vehicle, not specialized hardwares and equipment.