Line scan sensors are basically just scanners, heck people make em out of scanners .

Usually the issue is they need rather still subjects, but in this case rather than the sensor doing a scanning sweep they're just capturing the subject as it moves by, keeping the background pixels static.

It only works for trains because the image of train at t+1 is basically image of train at time t shifted over by a few pixels, right? It doesn't seem like this would work to capture a picture of a human, since humans don't just rigidly translate in space as they move.