In the braking of railway rolling stock, the slip that is the relative velocity between train body and its wheel affects the adhesive force which is connected to the braking force. The coefficient of the adhesive force changes in accordance with the slip and the condition of a rail road. Namely, its value increases upon the maximum on a rail condition, and there it declines conversely while the magnitude of slip keeps rising on. First, this paper introduced a reference slip generator so that can utilize maximum adhesive forces with a disturbance observer for estimating unmeasurable current adhesive forces which is as an input of the generator. And, an adaptive sliding-mode control system has been synthesized for minimizing the error between reference and current slip. Finally the effectiveness of the proposed control system is evaluated by computer simulation.