In this paper, an optimized adaptive robust extended Kalman filter is proposed based on random weighting factors and an improved whale optimization algorithm for fault estimation of the dynamics of high-speed trains with constant time delays, drastically changing noise and stochastic uncertainties. Robust upper bounds are proposed to improve the performance of the extended Kalman filter by decreasing the influence of the linearization error on filtering for the dynamics of high-speed trains with constant time delays, and its robustness is proven to guarantee the feasibility of the proposed upper bounds. Furthermore, considering drastically changing noise with unknown statistics, a random weighting adaptive algorithm is proposed to implement unbiased noise estimation so that the robust extended Kalman filter can still be implemented well. In addition, a differential evolution algorithm and adaptive parameter are introduced to improve the performance of the whale optimization algorithm so that the stochastic uncertainties are optimized, and the influence of the stochastic uncertainties on filtering is further decreased. The simulation results in the three conditions show that, compared with the variational Bayes adaptive iterated extended Kalman filter, using the proposed method, the position, speed and fault estimation errors are decreased by 31.8%, 33.2% and 28.3%, respectively, on average, which depends on more accurate noise estimation.