We propose an optical-based measuring instrument of catenary system in electric railway. This system was made to utilize line scan camera as inspecting system to measure the stagger and height of overhead contact wire in railway and composed with optical type source and FPGA-based image acquisition system with PCI slot. Vision acquisition software has been used for the application to programming interface for image acquisition, display, and storage with a frequency of sampling. To check the validity of our approach for the intended application, we monitored height and stagger in the overhead wire of a high-speed catenary system in Korea. The proposed optical-based measuring instrument to measure the contact wire geometry such as the hight and stagger shows promising on-field applications for online condition motoring. We expect that a new generation of real-time instruments with demanding various conditions motoring requirement in railway can be easily integrated into optical-based measuring instrument system.