Don't have access to that. Is it on the web?
The report I read (back at the time) said the full shock would have killed passengers on both trains, old and new. That's why automobiles today are purposely engineered with "crumble zones" to absorb the impact of energy in collisions. Likewise some abutments have barrels of water or sand in front of them to do the same thing. Some highway sign poles are designed to be 'breakaway' rather than rigid.
Of course, sometimes the law works strangely. There was an accident in an intersection of two local streets. One car hit another and pushed it into a utlity pole and the occupant was killed. The power company was sued blamed for having a pole in a dangerous place, even though the pole was on the sidewalk area, not in the roadway, and it was a local street, not a throughway. What was particularly galling was that the intersection and pole placement dated from the 1920s when that neighborhood was built, and many thousands of intersections just like that exist throughout the country. The power company didn't cause the accident, the errant auto did. But the power company had deep pockets which the auto owner didn't, so they got nailed.
Odd. The 1960 el cars I rode in Phila used an odd screw head, presumably to thwart that sort of thing.
For many years there was a federal standard that rail cars had to take
800,000 lbs of compression without deformation, and every car was so tested. I understand recently the Feds have raised that higher, meaning that new cars must be heavier to meet that standard. I am not aware that a heavier car is any safer, there are other factors that kill passengers that are more significant (severe collisions such as yours are relatively rare).Anyway, that's the minimum standard. It's possible, even likely that the older cars could take more of a hit so that's why there was a difference.
I believe in your accident the following train didn't stop at that station so it was going at full speed, thus the severity of the collision. In something that high impact there isn't too much that can be done to protect people. More effort is made to prevent collisions in the first place, though I know of two accidents where the engineer deliberately bypassed the safety gear and people were killed. One was a CTA L train where the motorman bypassed the autostop and kept power going (no one knows why) and rear ended another train causing them to fall off the L). Another was a Conrail freight that disregarded a yellow then a red signal and hit an Amtrak train (the engineer was high on pot, and disengaged the safety device).
Flat spots are very common on trains. They make freight trains noisy. Some passenger trains have wheel-slip protection which is essentially anti-lock brakes and they serve to reduce locked wheels which causes the grinding down and flat spots. Severe flat spots are annoying to ride over if your particular car has them. Actually, I don't think unpowered coaches have them, only self-propelled electric cars.
RR shops have truing machines that grind the wheel down to eliminate flat spots. After a while the wheel must be replaced, this is standard maintainence, at a train shop you'll see wheels lying around.
I don't know the particulars, but 50 year old equipment, as those were, have some disadvantages to new equipment. One is no air conditioning. Another is heavy weight which comes out to higher power consumption. A third is speed--newer trains can usually accelerate and stop faster which is significant in commuter service. A fourth is maintenance -- parts must be hand manufactured ($$$) for old cars and breakdowns are common.
Shortly after Amtrak was created it had a major upgrade of the coaches it inherited. It converted the tough steam powered utility lines to electric which was more reliable.
[TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: I do not think Chicago Daily News exists anywhere these days except as fond memories in the minds of its readers. It went out of business in 1976. All afternoon daily newspapers in Chicago were gone about that time. Hearst had the Chicago Herald; eventually merged it with the Chicago American to make the Herald-American, then sold it off to the Chicago Tribune. The Herald-American folded in 1967 and was replaced by a short lived paper called 'Chicago Today', which lasted for seven years and left the scene in 1974-75. The Daily News was edited and printed over on Canal Street near Madison Street and was founded in the late 1800's by Victor Lawson (of Lawson YMCA fame), who then sold it to Mr. Knight who had it until he sold it to the Chicago Sun-Times [itself a combo made up of the Chicago Sun and the Chicago Times which merged as the Sun-Times in 1941], then the Sun-Times closed the Daily News a few years later in 1976. Chicago Public Library has (or had) microfilms of the Daily News from its beginning to its end, but I seriously doubt any of it made it on computer. For three years, when I was 10-13 or thereabouts I had two paper routes: in the morning I delivered the Sun-Times and the Tribune; in the afternoon I delivered the Herald- American, the Daily News, a Polish newspaper called the 'Daily Zygoda' (I think that was it?), the Christian Science Monitor and one or two customers took the Wall Street Journal. I recall the Monitor always came by train from the east coast, and it always arrived two or three days after the publication date. But at the news agency, they always gave me a stack of those each day; also the 'TV Guide' magazine on Thursdays.I do not have any of those newspaper reports of the train crash any longer. I suppose I should have kept a copy of them but whoever thinks they are going to get old and want to go back to look at things in the future? PAT]