Has anyone ever heard of safety implications of sitting forwards v backwards on trains?
my thinking was that if youre facing forward and an accident happens - your face slams straight ito the hard plastic/metal chair in front..however..
if youre facing back towards where the train is setting off from, if an accident happens the back of your head is forced hard against the soft chair rest.
of course there will be all sorts of violent jolts afterwards, but if you have extra protection from the first bang, wont you be more likely to survive?
Answers:
I've never seen any studies, but I would think that backwards would be best, it would sort of cradle you in a crash. That's the premise behind backward facing car seats for infants.
none that I know of
ive thought about this before, and it's a difficult one - you are more likely to be thrown i guess if sitting forwards, but if you are facing back, maybe it is more likely that someone or something will be thrown into you?
You are correct that travelling backwards is safer as long as you have a headrest to prevent whiplash. The idea is that the whole of your body is equally restrained (by the chair) as opposed to your whole body flying forwards and impacting on something/someone.
Of course, if there is a person facing you (them travelling forwards), they are likely to end up smashing in to you.
ok, remember newton laws of motion.
1 back to the engine. good frontal impact protection as your mass gets slammed into the cushioning of the seat.
and then the seat in front of you gets sheared off its mountings and crushes you againstthe bulkhead,
2, you face front. the train hits something,,,unless its an articulated lorry, you wont notice. each carriage on a train weighs around 200 tons
3, the train is derailed. it doesnt matter where your sitting or which way youre facing. the protection is minimal. and your in a bomb weighing X many tons. and its the irresistable force, which will meet the immovable object, that will destroy everything.
Don't worry about any of that. Just never sit in the first three carriages. In trains going into London that's usually first class anyway. So, obviously, the reverse is true for trains leaving London.
If you want to choose sit facing the back so you don't end up being thrown forward down the carriage.
Well, i work as cabin crew for an airline and know that it is actually safer to sit facing backwards so i'm guessing the same priciple applies to travelling by train.
I don't know about the safety thing, but I find if I travel backwards, I get really disoriented and can't find my way out of the station after disembarking
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