The pantograph-catenary system is one of important components for high-speed rail system that are powered electrically. Electrical power is delivered from a catenary structure to the train via a pantograph and thus it is very important to regulate the contact force between catenary and pantograph. Although a lot of research results for active pantograph have been reported, most of them have made an unrealistic assumption that the catenary displacement is constant with respect to the time. In this paper, we present a new pantograph model that regards the catenary displacement as an unknown disturbance input. Moreover, a disturbance observer based controller is proposed to remove the effect of disturbance, i.e., the catenary displacement variation. The computer simulation result shows that the substantial improvement in regulating the contact force can be achieved by the proposed controller.