The performance of transmission lines and its shielding design during a lightning phenomenon are quite essential in the maintenance of a reliable power supply to consumers. The leader progression model, as an advanced approach, has been recently developed to calculate the shielding failure rate (SFR) of transmission lines using geometrical data and physical behavior of upward and downward lightning leaders. However, such method is quite time consuming. In the present paper, an effective method that utilizes artificial neural networks (ANNs) to create a metamodel for calculating the SFR of a transmission line based on shielding angle and height is introduced. The results of investigations on a real case study reveal that, through proper selection of an ANN structure and good training, the ANN prediction is very close to the result of the detailed simulation, whereas the Processing time is by far lower than that of the detailed model.