Several parts of an overhead transmission line have to be included in a model adequate for lightning overvoltage studies: wires (shield wires and phase conductors), towers, grounding, insulator strings and air clearances. An additional component, the surge arrester, should be added if the study is aimed at determining the lightning performance of a transmission line protected by surge arresters. This latter aspect is important since it can affect the model to be used for representing some parts of the line. Lightning is a physical phenomenon of random nature. The calculation of the lightning flashover rate must be performed taking into account this aspect, as well as the random behavior of some line component; e.g., insulator strings. The aim of this paper is twofold: on one hand, it presents a discussion about modeling guidelines proposed to date for representing overhead transmission lines in lightning studies; on the other hand, it proposes a methodology for selecting the most adequate model of an overhead transmission line in lightning overvoltage calculations, when using a time-domain simulation tool, e.g. an EMTP-like tool. This methodology is applied to a test transmission line.