I recently read about a train derailment in Germany that injured 30 people and unfortunately killed 4 people.
It’s also not too long after a separate derailment in Italy, albeit nobody was injured there.
I know it’s easy to say that trains are usually very safe, probably safer than cars, but all you need to do is look at instances of derailments to see that when a train derails, there’s a good chance of someone being seriously injured if not killed.
With that in mind, wouldn’t it be a good idea to have seatbelts in trains? Could they save lives just like they do with road traffic collisions?
Same as the RAF did for years, travelling backwards stops people from leaving the seat on impact as you are thrown against the seat back and it also to an extent protects the head. Many derailments don’t involve major rollovers unless you are on an embankment.
It’s why military aircraft passengers face backwards, because it’s safer, and military passengers don’t have the luxury of complaining that civvies do.
When trains crash they tend to crash big & roll overs along with jack knife cartridges tend to be common.
I would say seat belts in such circumstances would not be helpful as it is something more likely to fail & trap you than saving your life.
Having a quick google on the question and it appears the reason why not is that seat belts are designed for a rapid deceleration of momentum and not what happens with train.
You also have the fact that things that fly about the carriage (bags, trees, passengers) would more likly to kill someone as when hit they don’t move out of the way as they are pinned to their seat.
Passengers seated and belted up would at least stop them travelling around the carriage crashing into the poor unfortunate souls who were standing.
With the decreasing frequency of services (certainly in our area), there is an ever increasing pressure of seats - or, more specifically, an ever increasing number of standing passengers. We’re also seeing more “standing areas” and fewer seats.
If I remember (and I’m working from my undergrad course here… a long time ago), TFL actually published a report on passenger safety - which basically said “cram them in - it’s safer”!!! Paraphrasing here - but the basic principle was that “smarties rattle less when there’s more smarties in the tube”.
However, anything less than this optimum number, does see more people rattling around and damaging themselves and each other.
Indeed. And said mentality is leaching into cross country services. It will be interesting to see the risk matrix for this and the cost/benefit analysis!
I’m 99% certain that no Voyager has rear-facing seats. They wouldn’t be able to be used by airlines when not in RAF service if that was the case, and retro fitting the seats would cost far too much.
