The current collection quality of pantograph–catenary directly determines the stable and safe operation of highspeed trains, which is one of the key factors restricting the highest driving speed of trains [1]. Due to the huge cost and difficulties of the field experiment in a real railway line, mathematical modeling has been a prevalent tool to study the dynamic performance of the pantograph–catenary system. Nowadays, the studies of modeling and simulation for railway catenary mainly focused on two points. The first one is the static solution for the initial equilibrium state, which is to calculate the static configuration of the catenary to make it meet the design requirements (such as the tension, arrangement of droppers and pre-sag). The other one is the dynamic solution for the pantograph–catenary interaction, including the dynamic modeling method, solution algorithm as well as some simulations for external disturbances, such as wind, iced line and irregularities of contact wire. In 2012, the Ministry of Railways of China proposed ‘High-speed Railway Power Supply Security Detection and Monitoring System,’ namely ‘۶C’ system. The core idea is to use the captured pictures and video to realize the noncontact detection. However, the level of automatic image recognition needs to be improved. High-speed railway pantograph–catenary system is a random vibration system, and its dynamic characteristic evaluation is difficult. At present, the dynamic characteristic evaluation of pantograph–catenary system is mainly based on statistical parameters, such as the stationary mean value and variance in the European standard [2]. These evaluation indexes assume that the data of pantograph–catenary system is generalized stationary, which cannot satisfy the requirement for dynamic analysis of high-speed pantograph– catenary system; besides, it is difficult to evaluate the pantograph–catenary system performance efficiently using a single statistic. The overview in this paper mainly focuses on four aspects of the current research, which are the simulation, modeling, detection and evaluation of catenary. Firstly, the existing solution methods for the initial equilibrium state are summarized. The common solution methods for linear and nonlinear dynamics of catenary are classified and discussed. And, previous studies on the effect of environmental wind on catenary are reviewed. Then, non-contact detection techniques for catenary, especially various detection methods and strategies, are summarized. The state evaluation of catenary is reviewed, which mainly focuses on evaluation methods on the static and dynamic state of catenary and their validity. At last, addressing the current shortfalls, some suggestions are proposed for future research.