team photo

Figure 1
project photo

Figure 2
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Team 6

Team Members

Faculty Advisor

Joshua Connor
Sean Doolittle
Rebecca Feldman
Shalini Shial

Nicholas Lownes

Sponsor

Town of Thompson, CT

sponsored by
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The overall goal of our project is to rework the parking lot area in the East Thompson area near the Air Line State Park Trail, where the Great East Thompson Train Wreck took place. We were asked to provide a general layout for recreating the parking lot near the trail due to the increase in demand during the pandemic and to improve the visibility and design of the area. As engineers, we also wanted to incorporate things we had learned in class, so we also observed how we can improve the safety of the area for pedestrians, how we can deal with some of the water retention problems, and how we should design the parking lot, including location of features and the material used. We were also able to get in contact with engineers who previously worked on a design for the parking lot and an engineer who has experience with improving park design. This helped guide us into the direction of an elevated crosswalk over a speed reduction and sparked our interest to research a material that works for our site, which we found was stamped asphalt bricks. Even though we received help from some professional engineers, this project is meant to be a learning experience for our team and Thompson will likely apply changes to the design in order to better fit their needs. Some topics we researched to help guide our planning include improved stormwater maintenance methods, techniques to improve pedestrian safety, park and design amenities, and grading and material preference in different climates. There were also limitations to the amount of work we could put into this project due to the restrictions of the coronavirus pandemic, so we tried our best and provided what was expected of us from our sponsor’s team perspective.