In the transportation industry every vehicle that makes contact with the road and propels itself, is subjected to roll-slip in the wheel-road interface. Therefore a good understanding of this phenomenon is important. This article describes roll-slip contacts in general, with extra attention for the wheel-rail contact which is commonly used. Firstly the contact area and the pressure distribution that occur when a normal load is applied between two bodies is discussed. On this base, the traction

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... echanisms for static and rolling configurations are shown. Lastly, wear mechanisms and two different wear maps are shown which are very useful and commonly used in wear mapping of roll-slip contacts. A good agreement with field measurements can be obtained.