Error in the last post: (car) crashes without airbags & seatbelts are probably not survivable by a significant percentage of people at speeds over about 30-35 mph. Above 60-70 (equivalent speed into a fixed barrier) they aren't even survivable with a good "civilian" seatbelt arrangement. I've seen the results when 2 vehicles come together at normal highway speed (55 mph or so, equivalent to 110 mph closing speed) - survival is questionable even with seat belts and all the normal devices, and life-threatening injury is certain. You expect trains to be different in a head-on or otherwise full-stop crash?

I suspect FRA as usual is fighting the 'last war' with their structural regulations. What they have has worked in crashes up to the equivalent of 50-60 mph into a barrier. The Metrolink "crush zone" concept is really just an add-on to the basic FRA structure which makes a cab-car crash against another train more survivable in general - and at the closing speeds of commuter trains and freight trains it should help significantly. Luckily, it hasn't been tested yet in real life.

As has been said here snidely, it isn't speed that kills, it's stopping quickly, and crush zones help spread out the time of the stop and therefore reduce the acceleration and how hard people hit things inside. The concept is well-proven in cars, and works up to the point where you run out of crush space; then you have to have the strong structure too. Older lightweight European stuff didn't have those crush zones or the strong structure behind them; they were just light, as shown by severe damage even in lower-speed wrecks like the recent one in Spain and the WMATA wreck. I suspect the newer trains are beginning to improve their crash safety designs - not least because they want to sell something here. So in a sense the article was right, but we may be seeing the Euro trains because they've been modified appropriately to meet strength & crush requirements and still operate well - not (necessarily) because we've dumbed our standards down to where they don't do the job any more.

The best way to have crash safety, of course, is not to have crashes. Discussions elsewhere here about PTC don't leave me with a Really Good Feeling about that. Would Metrolink, for instance, have been better off to just upgrade their old ATS system and add it to their non-ATSF-derived lines? And how do transit systems do it, where trains have overspeed trips that vary according to signal indication and location on the line, without GPS-based PTC?