When a railway train enters a tunnel at high speed, a compression wave is formed in front of the train and propagates along the tunnel. The compression wave subsequently emerges from the exit of the tunnel, which causes an impulsive noise. In order to estimate the magnitudes of the noises and to effectively minimize them, the characteristics of the compression wave propagating in a tunnel must be understood. In the present paper, the experimental and analytical investigations on the attenuation and distortion of the propagating compression waves were carried out using a model tunnel. This facility is a kind of open-ended shock tube with a fast-opening gate valve instead of a general diaphragm. One-dimensional flow model employed in the present study could appropriately predict the strength of the compression wave, Mach number and flow velocity induced by the compression wave. The experimental results show that the strength of a compression wave decreases with the distance from the tunnel entrance. The decreasing rate of the wave strength and pressure gradient in the wave is strongly dependent on the strength of the initial compression wave at the tunnel entrance.