Word.ws English Dictionary

contact shoe

contact shoe noun: a current collector on an electric train which is in contact with the live rail.

contact shoe: a current collector on an electric train which is in contact with the live rail
Image: Daniel Schwen, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Noun

contact shoe (plural contact shoes)

  1. A current collector on an electric train which is in contact with the live rail.
  2. A part of a pantograph on a train or tram which, when raised, maintains contact with an overhead electric wire.
    • The leading locomotive of the double-headed 3.5 p.m. Manchester Piccadilly-Plymouth shed the contact shoe of its pantograph, which bounced back along the roof and hit the pantograph of the second locomotive, which thereupon lost its contact shoe also.1963 January, “Motive power miscellany”, in Modern Railways, page 64

Synonyms of contact shoe

Forms of contact shoe

pluralcontact shoes

Questions about contact shoe

What does contact shoe mean?
Contact shoe means a current collector on an electric train which is in contact with the live rail.
What part of speech is contact shoe?
Contact shoe is a noun.
What is the plural of contact shoe?
The plural of contact shoe is contact shoes.

Words near contact shoe in the dictionary

  1. contact printing
  2. contact prints
  3. contact process
  4. contact sheet
  5. contact sheets
  6. contact shoe
  7. contact shoes
  8. contact shot
  9. contact shots
  10. contact sport
  11. contact sports

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: contact shoe (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “contact shoe.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/contact_shoe. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.