Basic design for single-phase active power filter, which aims at railway application provided with PWM-controlled converters, is comprehensively studied and its performance is presented in this paper. Active power filters are used to compensate railway signaling and public telecommunication interference due to the high-order harmonic currents generated in railway traction locomotives. A type of hybrid digital filter which is composed of low pass filter and high pass filter is proposed so that the desired harmonic reference current with accurate magnitude and phase shift can be extracted from catenary line current. A design criteria to determine input inductor L and output capacitor C is also described, considering voltage, current, PWM pattern, and switching frequency of the main converters. Finally, computer simulation and DSP-based experiments resulted from laboratory test are presented.