Railway structures are often built near active faults in the Japanese Archipelago. In order to improve the safety of trains running on railway structures, therefore, it is important to predict earthquake ground motion taking into account the effect of such faults. We first investigated the characteristics of earthquake motion propagation over wide areas with active faults using the stiffness matrix method, and then developed a technique to predict near-fault ground motion by coupling the results of the stiffness matrix method with 2D FEM analysis.