As catenary supply electric power directly to the railway system, it is very important to prevent an accident of a catenary for appropriate train operations. This paper analyzed the outage data for British catenary safety analysis report and Korean data to compare the reliability of the railway systems. The analyzed data were applied to Fault Tree Analysis(FTA) algorithm to calculate the reliability indices of a railway system. Failure rate of an electric railway system through FTA were calculated for each element and the entire railway system. The reliability indices can be used to determine the eqipment to be replaced for the entire system reliability improvement.