Fatigue cracks usually occur at welded joints of heavy haul wagon body, in order to effectively curb the occurrence of such problems from the design stage, it is researched from structural design strategy to structural optimization method in this paper. Firstly, when analyzing the finite element simulation results, the new structural design strategy not only pays attention to the maximum stress which can reflect the stress concentration position, but also focuses on the stress distributions at the key welded joints. Secondly, in order to further reduce the stress at the key positions, the paper gives the optimization method which integrates orthogonal experimental design, BP network and MPSO algorithm. Finally, 80t gondola car body is optimized from the whole structure to the local area by the method. Meanwhile, it is also verified that the structural optimization method of heavy haul wagon body is reasonable and feasible.