Effects of table design in railway carriages on pregnant occupant safety

Abstract

This paper focuses on safety investigations for pregnant occupants, in particular, on their interactions with an interior feature, fixed bay tables, in railway vehicles. The computational pregnant occupant model Expecting has represented pregnant travellers in railway vehicle environments. Expecting is a computational pregnant occupant model developed at Loughborough University, in order to investigate the dynamic response of pregnant women to impacts. It has been successfully utilised by the authors in earlier studies, in various automobile crash investigations, such as frontal impacts with real and simplified crash pulses. In this study, a model of a network train carriage is generated and used together with Expecting to assess the suitability of fixed bay table designs for pregnant occupants. Investigations of potential injuries in this paper are believed to contribute to the design of more suitable interior features and hence improve safety and quality of life for pregnant women as travellers in railway vehicles.

Keywords:

• pregnant traveller
• placental abruption
• railway vehicle
• network train
• interior design
• fixed bay table

Acknowledgements

The authors thank the EPSRC and the Innovative Manufacturing and Construction Research Centre (IMCRC) of Loughborough University for sponsoring ‘Rail Transport Safety for Pregnant Occupants – Preliminary Investigations’ research project, Bombardier Transportation UK Ltd for useful technical information and MADYMO. The authors also thank the referees for their useful comments that helped improve the paper.