<p>Urban rail transit plays a critical role in developing sustainable, efficient, and livable cities by reducing pollution, improving mobility, and supporting economic growth. The train virtual coupling (VC) is a train operation scenario, where adjacent trains form a convoy, in the convoy there are leader train, and follower trains. This reduces train headway and improves system capacity using the relative braking distance instead of the current applied communication-based train control (CBTC) absolute braking distance. However, during actual train operations, nonlinear disturbances caused by the operation environment result in deviations of the leader train’s trajectory from the desired path, causing instability in the tracking process of the train virtual coupling. To mitigate the unstable variations caused by environmental factors during the operation of follower trains, this paper integrates the advantages of fuzzy control and PID control by designing a variable domain fuzzy PID control algorithm (VDFPID) with dynamically adjustable fuzzy rules. Compared to the fuzzy PID (FPID) control and traditional PID control methods, the VDFPID proposed in this paper shortens the headway while ensuring the safe operation of virtual coupling trains, and is suitable for the complex environment of virtual coupling train operation in railway systems as it can achieve high-precision speed and distance control in dynamic scenarios, offering enhanced safety and adaptability.</p>