Road vehicle tyres, railway wheels and ball bearings all generate rolling contact forces which are transferred within a finite area of contact between the rolling element and the substrate. Either it is visible or not for the human eye, a certain degree of roughness is always present on the contacting surfaces and it influences the generation of both vertical and lateral contactforces. The purpose of this investigation is to enhance the understanding and modelling of the influence from small-scale surface roughness on the generation of rolling contact forces. To this end, a computationally efficient method to include roughness-induced contact nonlinearities in the dynamic modelling of rolling contacts is proposed. The method is implemented in a time domain model for vertical wheel–track interaction to model rolling-induced rail vibrations, showing good agreement with measurements. Furthermore, a test rig is developed and used for the investigation of tyre–road rolling contact forces. Detailed studies are performed on the influence of substrate roughness on the resulting contact forces for a tyre tread block which is rolling at different operating conditions. The choice of substrate as well as the rolling velocity and the slip ratio is observed to have significant influence on the resulting friction coefficient. For high slip ratios, stick–slip oscillations appear, exhibiting frequency content which is largely dependent on the choice of substrate. The outcomes of this study can potentially be used to improve future tyre–road contacts with respect to wear, traction and noise generation.