Currently in Korea, the simple catenary type overhead contact line system is being applied to both conventional lines and high speed lines of electric railway, and circulation current flowing into the catenary system frequently bring undesirable consequences. Namely, the connector wire has many problems according to a flow of excessive circulation current and arc current on catenary when an electric train runs at high speed. This paper presents the development and application of a real-time data acquisition system designed to measure the electrical characteristics of an overhead catenary system in electric railways. The developed system is capable of storing data of a 25 kV power source in a live wire state through a telemetry environment. The field test results show that the proposed technique and the developed system can be practically applied to measure characteristics of current of an overhead catenary system.