To meet railway communication demand, conventional railway mobile communication systems includingrnGlobal System for Mobile Communication-Railway and Terrestrial Trunked Radio have beenrnchallenged in terms of capacity, coverage and quality. To address the capacity, coverage and qualityrnchallenges, Long Term Evolution (LTE) has been emerged as an alternative important wirelessrntechnology for railway.rnAddis Ababa Light Rail Transit Service (AALRTS) has been operational since September 2015 servingrnan average of 130,000 users daily with its two lines extended from east to west (Line 1) andrnnorth to south (Line 2) of Addis Ababa. To AALRTS communication demand, LTE network hasrnbeen planned and deployed at 400 MHz carrier frequency. The network consists of 4 sites of 9 LTErncells operating with 3MHz bandwidth and planned antenna and other configurations. Although thernnetwork provides quality service for current rail voice/data service in most parts of both rail lines,rnthere are coverage challenge in some parts of the lines and it needs to be enhanced for the increasingrnmultimedia service demand.rnThe objective of this thesis is to quantitatively articulate aforementioned coverage challenge of thernLTE network for AALRTS and then to perform optimization campaign to address the challenge. Tornarticulate the coverage challenge, data is collected using drive test around challenged parts of the railrnlines beside data obtained from management system of the network. Drive test is undertaken usingrnHuawei EP680 LTE terminal and obtained data is analyzed using Matlab. Optimization is performedrnfor antenna parameters of existing network cells and location of a newly added cell using searchrnmethod from potential values. For the optimization, network simulation is performed using Win-rnProp network simulation tool and for propagation computation deterministic dominant path modelrnis applied. For performance analysis, signal-to-interference-plus-noise-ratio (SINR) is used as a keyrnmetric.rnDrive test result shows that 17% and 6% parts of Lines 1 and 2 SINR results are less than 7dB, respectively.rnIndependent and combined antenna height and power optimization provides significantrncoverage improvement while antenna tilt and azimuth optimization present negligible performancerngains. Furthermore, adding a new LTE cell and optimizing its location presents excellent SINR improvement.