Literature Review
Impact Mitigation
Intelligent locomotive bumper designs have been touted as possible life-savers for pedestrians. Paden, Kelly, Hines, Botham and Simms explored the feasibility of a life-saving locomotive bumper (103). There were several motivations behind their paper. Perhaps the most important one was the high number of pedestrians that were killed every year in train impacts. Between the years 2007 and 2012, about 10,950 non-suicide deaths were attributed to train impact on humans. Including suicide deaths on railroads, 28,800 pedestrians were killed during that 6-year period. Also, Paden et al., noted that passenger trains served densely populated areas ( ...
