This literature review will confirm prior work in the use of locomotive airbag technologies for vehicle or pedestrian collision mitigation, and to focus planned activities and tasks for this research. The state of the art in relevant technologies has been summarized to assess the feasibility of this technology and identify critical model challenges for supporting impact simulations. The literature review did not reveal any currently deployed locomotive airbag solutions. In patent literature, external airbag technology has been described for mitigation of crashes between railcars and motor vehicles, but no meaningful analysis of feasibility has been discussed in detail in scientific or professional literature. Therefore, it appears that although crash mitigation technology using airbags in front of locomotives has been conceptualized, it has not yet been rigorously engineered or implemented.