at least no more trolley problems

I understand what you are saying, but I strongly disagree. Karens weaponize their karen-ness sometimes to a lethal degree. So „murder of Karens“ is quite fitting imho. A group of Crows on the other hand should be called something entirely different, that does their beauty and intelligence justice. Something like: A „conference“ or a „council“ of crows.

The idea is he’s straining so hard because he’s trying to use the exact amount of force he needs to stop the train without harming anyone inside. Too much force on the train and everyone in the train gets injured or killed, too little and it doesn’t stop in time to save the kid, and I believe in this one he didn’t have the option of just grabbing the kid because he would have been hurt too badly from the sudden acceleration.

If you’ve ever tried to assemble something where you’ve gotta snap together two pretty fragile pieces it’s a similar idea. You absolutely can generate way more than the force needed to get the job done, the difficulty is in having the pieces survive the attempt.

I can tell you I have experienced it with models and computer components and you’d absolutely think I was arm wrestling a God with how much I was straining trying to push those parts together without breaking them.

Edit again: I think I found where this is from. I guess it’s from Action Comics 1000 with the actual thing that’s happening being like a deja vu flashback of Superman’s comic history. Like the current canon Superman of the time is seeing flashes of things he personally hasn’t done but were part of the history of the character.

So this would have been from a significantly less powerful Superman and was most likely a situation where the train was going to crash so stopping the train without hurting the people was the main goal with the kid wandering into the path of the train while he was already trying to keep the train from crashing

But then isn’t he accelerating the people on the train just as much?

That goes for the people on the train too though. If he had so little time that he couldn’t move the kid 2 meters without giving him whiplash, then stopping the train in that same amount of time would send everybody on the train flying to the front of their cars at whatever speed the train was going.

There’s a whole locomotive between them to dampen the impact.

Same reason why modern cars are designed to crumple. It absorbs more of the impact before it reaches the people inside.

Didn’t they try to make something like that canon years ago? That Superman has some kind of field he extends to objects he touches that in part dampens some of the physics implications of the movements he’s shown to be able to do carrying objects and people that don’t immediately rip themselves apart from G forces? Or am I misremembering?

Why are we assuming it’s a passenger train? It’s probably just a choice between a small child or a middle aged conductor who did survive according to the illustration if only because they decided to draw him in afterwards as a form of censorship.

Please pardon me if I’m missing something obvious. I don’t understand how censorship is involved.

Well if they didn’t draw him in we’d all be assuming Superman murdered that guy just like user Oops just declared.

Okay, thank you. I didn’t understand your use of the word “censorship”. That’s not common usage in American English, which is all I speak.

Why are we assuming it’s a passenger train? It’s probably just a choice between a small child or a middle aged conductor who did survive according to the illustration if only because they decided to draw him in afterwards as a form of censorship.

So only the first ten or so cars will be scenes of unbelievable carnage. Meanwhile, he could have simply picked up the kid and cushioned him from the impact.

But then isn’t he accelerating the people on the train just as much?

Depends on the time in which he had to do the deceleration. I did some more looking and I guess that this page comes from Action Comics 1000 from a short bit where the current iteration of Superman is getting deja vu like flashes of things that this iteration of the character has not done but were rather part of the overall character’s history.

So this likely came from a very early iteration of Superman that A) wasn’t nearly as strong or fast, and B) that the situation most likely began with attempting to stop a runaway train from crashing. Then while attempting to stop the train, a child wandered into the path of the train and Clark couldn’t exactly let go of the train to move the kid out of harm’s way.

I personally like “Litigation of Karens” for how often their involvement tends to involve them threatening to sue or press charges on someone.

If he can decelerate the passengers in the train non lethally, he by definition also had time to accelerate the kid nonlethally. Supes has muscles for brains.

Not if he was already pushing the train when the kid entered the equation. If this is an earlier version of Superman as this seems to be and he was already pushing the train when the kid came into the picture, then the only way for him to accelerate off the train to grab the kid is if he pushes off the train. Which effectively creates the same “stopping the train too fast,” problem.

If he pushes off the train, he starts from Vo=Vtrain, he simply has to push off less than he would if he were standing still to get to the kid, since Vintercept would be quite a bit greater than 0 anyway. If Vintercept is smaller than Vtrain, that would mean there is no non-lethal solution, passengers in the first car would experience the same (lethal) deceleration or the kid would experience lethal acceleration.

He would also decelerate (and then accelerate) during the kid intercept, which being ‘super’, I would expect him to be able to do, as he can perceive things faster as well.

Snap the neck? Just support the neck. Just put the kid on his whole torso so the kid’s body experiences the acceleration as a monolith as if on a rocket seat.

Him starting off at the velocity of the train is the problem. It’s not as simple as “Superman just goes a little faster,” momentum has to be conserved. To launch himself forward he has to launch the train backward and the train likely doesn’t survive that. Continuing to push the train was still likely the best option Superman had in this situation.