In light of the difficulty of directly measuring the wheel-rail contact force, a time domain identification method is proposed. First, a 10-degrees-of-freedom vehicle inversion model of vertical vibration considering the vertical and pitch is established. Then, the wheel-rail contact force is identified based on the system’s acceleration and displacement responses. The measured responses are reconstructed and the unmeasured responses are identified. The inversion model is verified using a rolling-vibration test-bed. The identification and experimental results are highly relevant, with a correlation coefficient of over 0.9.