I’m no math wiz but I think a train that travels at 300mph would mean the energy released in a car/train accident would be 16 times what it would be if the train was just going 60mph.
So hitting a 1200lb cow at 300mph would be the same a train hitting a 20,000lb object at 60mph. I’m thinking de-railment.
Your math is correct, but trains are designed to handle spattering flesh and bone. Been designed that way for a very long time.
Splattering steel? They try, but at 220 mph, no way. And the remains of a large steel object have a good chance of derailing the train. Then, as I said, ka-boom!
Ooops, it’s 25 time more...
The energy that is released during a collision is equal to the difference of initial energy of the train and the residual energy of the train after the collision. If the train is completely stopped by the obstacle then all kinetic energy of the train (m*v^2) is delivered and the train is at rest.
So two things here matter: how much energy is produced in a collision and over what period of time this delivery of energy occurs. With regard to the latter, you can safely burn a ton of powder in your revolver, one round at a time. But if you combine all that powder into one charge you'd better have a good cannon at hand.
Collisions are hard to accurately simulate because of the nature of the obstacle. But we can easily say that the mass of the train far exceeds the mass of a cow. In collision therefore the speed of the train will be virtually unchanged. Then all we need to worry about is acceleration of the cow to the speed of the train.
We know exactly how much it takes: E=m*v^2. Energy increases with speed squared. (m*v1^2)/(m*v2^2) = (v1/v2)^2. Using your values (300 mph and 60 mph) we get 25 (not 16.)
If you want to see what difference the mass makes, m1*300^2 = m2*60^2. Solving for m2 we get: m2=(m1*300^2)/60^2. Using your 1,200lb cow at 300 mph we see that the mass of an equivalent obstacle at 60 mph would be 30,000 lb or 13 tons. It's about four adult elephants standing on tracks side by side. (and of course our methods start to fail here because the train is not rigid enough to plow through so many elephants.)
I’m thinking de-railment.
More than likely. The train will be seriously compressed even if the cow (or elephants) are accelerated to the train's speed. In reality the train will crumple first. The energy of the collision will be about 10 MJ. The energy density of TNT is 2.1 MJ/lb. So a collision with a cow is equivalent to exploding about 5 lb of TNT. Far smaller quantities in World War II used to blow whole engines off the track.