My employer at that time did an engineering study of the accident.
It was a terrible accident, but the death toll was around 40, not 200.
Some people said the trains should've been strong enough to withstand the impact without telecscoping into each other. But the civil engineers pointed out that if the trains were that strong, the resulting 'g' shock force would've been strong enough to kill all the passengers on board.
IIRC, the problem was that when the first train overshot the platform, it cleared the signal block so that the second train could proceed. Then the first train in backing up re-entered the block. I believe the engineer was supposed to call in for permission before backing up and have the rear-end protected. The Illionis Central ran a very heavy density of service.
I was on a subway train that overshot the platform by a considerable distance not long after that. The motorman did call in for permission before backing up, but I was thinking of the IC wreck and was kind of nervous about it.
If you look on many subway and trolley cars, you'll see the "bumpers" have ridges on them. They are known as "anti-climbers" and are supposed to protect from trains telescoping into each other if they collide.
As to your experiences, as mentioned, the railroads were losing money big time on their trains and most had applied to discontinue them. Some railroads had only one or two trains to run so they didn't mind as much doing a decent job, but they still wanted out. Indeed, the song "City of New Orleans" that you mention is about the decay of the trains.
Western Union likewise had a nice operation in 1950. That company went bankrupt and no longer exists, the Western Union today bought the name. Lousy Govt regulation played a role in that demise. Even in
1960 Western Union _seemed_ healthy but it was on the skids. [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Did you see that nice picture of me on the front page of the Chicago Daily News? They printed my entire testimony to the safety inspector. The train engineer had admitted he overshot the station platform 'just a little'. In my testimony I said that was nonsense, he overshot sufficiently that looking outside the window of the car I was sitting in, I looked directly at a 'mile marker' sign hanging on a catenary pole; I told them which sign it was and the audience 'gasped' when the distance the train had to go backward was calculated. It was a distance of a couple hundred feet at least.Also, you just now spoke about the 'g-force' of the trains hitting, but where you are wrong about that was the train I was on (which got smacked up pretty good) was one of the newer, more 'light-weight' and more flimsy cars. The train which hit us was one of the older, grey colored very heavy cars from the 1920's genre. I discussed that in my testimony also, saying in effect "if I were to ride downtown on one of the newer cars and take along with me a heavy, large size 'phillips screw-driver' I could take the entire car apart before we got to downtown. Made as they were out of aluminum, the newer cars were no match for the older style cars." One of the railroad executives at that point made an objection to my testimony; told me to shut my trap and keep myself stifled and not talk anymore, but the hearing officer in charge of the testimony over-ruled his objection to my speech and encouraged me to keep talking about my experiences with the new style cars. That same afternoon when the hearing reconvened after lunch they took me down to the trackside to (a) point out the 'mile marker' where _I_ was sitting when we started backing up and (b) they gave me a large, sturdy tool to use to demonstrate how I could unscrew one of the wall panels in the coach. The Daily News article the next day told how the railroad had told me to shut up and not talk so much; they put my picture and my oral testimony in the paper entirely, along with the other reports, etc. The company which had built the new cars for the railroad looked at me with much hatred, to say the least.
There were other incidental situations where a 'new' car was bumped by an old car (they did that as part of their testing) and even though the 'old' car just barely bumped the 'new car' there were still dent marks on the 'new' car. The "Chicago Today" newspaper (which we had back then, like the Daily News, but no longer) agreed with the railroad that I was a crazy person, but the Daily News did not think so. My friend (who I said a couple days ago I had taken to New Orleans with me on vacation earlier) called the railroad one day to report (by car number and axle number) a 'flat wheel' on one of the new cars. (A 'flat wheel' is one that is not entirely round, at a certain place in the circumference of the wheel it is a bit out of shape; the result is a person with a good ear or lots of railroad experience [as he had] can hear a certain 'chunk-chunk' noise as the train rapidly moves down the track). The railroad told him off good also, but then a day or two later called him back to say they had investigated it and found it to be as he said it was. Those 'new' cars were no match for the 'older' (1920-ish) cars they abandoned for no good reason. PAT]