Under the new situation of higher education reform and development such as emerging engineering education and curriculum-based ideological and political education, new requirements have been proposed for the training of future transportation talents. Subgrade and pavement engineering is one of the core courses for road and railway engineering discipline, which also undertakes the important task of exploring and practicing curriculum education. In the recent 3 years, it starts from the in-depth exploration of the various elements for curriculum-based ideological and political education (ideal and faith, political identification, national sentiment, cultural literacy, career ideal and morality). Materials with ideological and political characteristics from road infrastructure construction and maintenance are systematically collected and summarized. Then the curriculum syllabus is revised by interactive discussions among the faculty team, and finally, the teaching design is improved that merging ideological and political education elements into professional knowledge. Meanwhile, attention is paid to collect on-class questionnaire feedback reflecting the practical teaching effect from the student perspective, which aims to optimize and improve the ideological and political element arrangement and teaching quality of the course. The overall target of ideological and political element every week and case study every chapter is gradually achieved.