Recently, MIMO communications are regarded as one of the most promising emerging wireless technologies. This paper investigates MIMO wireless systems and their applications in a railway communication system. We firstly discuss railway communication environments including propagation characteristics and radio channel modeling. Next, we consider channel estimate methods, which is a crucial issue under rapidly varying channel condition due to the movement of trains. Channel estimation methods for MIMO systems are addressed and the effect of estimation error is studied. We also have performed simulations for transmit beamforming system and STBC(Space-time block coding) to investigate the performance of MIMO schemes in railway systems.