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Matt_Stevenson comments on The Problem With Trolley Problems - Less Wrong
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But physicists don't ignore friction when performing experiments, they do so only in teaching. If philosophers used trolley problems only to teach ethics ("Push one fat philosopher onto the tracks, to save two drug addicts.") or to teach metaethics ("An adherent of virtue ethics probably wouldn't push") then I doubt that lionhearted would complain.
But we have psychologists using trolley problems to perform experiments (or, if from Harvard, to publish papers in which they claim to have conducted experiments). That is what I understand lionhearted to be objecting to.
I think a better example than frictionless surfaces and no air resistance would be idealized symmetries. Once something like Coulomb's Law was postulated physicists would imagine the implications of charges on infinite wires and planes to make interesting predictions.
We use the trolley problem and its variations as thought experiments in order to make predictions we can test further with MRIs and the like.
So a publication on interesting trolley problem results would be like theoretical physics paper showing relativity predicts some property of black holes.