This paper describes a low-cost single-phase active power filter, which consists of a half-bridge PWM inverter with a simple control circuit. In order to verify the performance of proposed active power filter, many computer simulations with EMTP codes and experimental works with a hardware prototype were done. Both results confirm that the proposed active power filter shows excellent performance to eliminate the harmonics generated in the single-phase non-linear load. The active power filter has advantage of low implementation cost and compact size, using a half-bridge inverter and a simple control circuit with only one current sensor. So, it can be fabricated as a plug-in type. This paper shows the necessity and a good possibility to apply such advantage to the electric railway system.