In order to improve the safety of the railway network, accurately knowing the train’s location on a track section is an important task. Generally, this can be ensured by the technical system known as "track circuit". The reliability of the track circuit depends on the quality of the electrical contact between the wheel and the rail. Unfortunately, any degradation of the materials (wheel-rail) can result in a malfunction of the track circuit and thus a failure of the train detection, which can be extremely dangerous in terms of the safety of the rail network and passengers. In this paper, the designing and realization of a test bench that reproduces the electrical wheel-rail contact at a laboratory scale is presented. The scaling was done considering mechanical, electrical, and thermal effects. An original homemade salt spray system was elaborated and used to obtain a controlled oxidation of the rail. Some preliminary results of the electrical resistance behavior of the test bench as a function of several parameters (contact force, roughness and surface oxidation) are examined.