The measurement of dynamic stagger in electric railways is one of the key test parameters to increase speed and maintain safety in electric railways. This paper is introduces a non-contact optical-based measuring instrument of a catenary system in electric railways. The instrument is implemented by utilizing a CCD (Charge Coupled Device) camera installed on the roof of a vehicle for vision acquisition and image processing techniques including the Canny edge detector and the Hough transform to detect contact wires and calculate dynamic stagger. To check the validity of our approach for the intended application, we measured stagger of a overhead wire of a Korea Tilting Train (TTX). The non-contact optical-based measurement system proposed in this paper performs real-time stagger measurement of an activated high-voltage contact wire. By results of this paper, the instrument should be applied to assess performance and reliability of newly developed electric railway vehicles.