Abstract
Professional Engineers are ethically bound to regard public welfare as paramount, above all other considerations. Public welfare encompasses health, safety, economics, environmental and other considerations. These considerations are stressed throughout the CEAB graduate attributes. However, issues around public welfare are often absent from student learning experiences, particularly capstone design. This paper describes a capstone project motivated by the Lac- Mégantic train disaster. The students involved in this project researched the background of the accident, identified the contributing factors, and developed a problem definition to develop an improved braking system to prevent runaway trains. The proposed solution was a simple pneumatic drive connected to the handwheels of the manual brakes to reduce the time and effort involved in setting the brakes. This design could be retrofitted to existing rail cars at a cost of about $10,000 per car. Future improvements include implementation of a wireless control system to actuate and monitor the brakes from the locomotive cab.
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