You still had 'em in Britain 20 years ago!?!?

At least for the Continent, I must paint a different picture.

The horrific casualties from crashes involving carriages with a wooden or cast-iron frame prompted a programme (starting out from Germany, where the worst of these accidents occured) to phase out the latter completely already before WWII, and continued after the post-war shortages subsided. From the fifties, there have been international standards for express car construction, and passenger cars were not far behind in structural strength.

What railway cars lacked and most still do is crash zones to swallow energy. But I shall give a hint that that doesn't matter that much. Crash zones are useful only at low speeds, say 30 km/h. Above that, you must hope that if the train gets in trouble, it has somewhere to go. If it has room, passengers may be shaken or thrown around, but it should stay in one piece (as happened at Potters Bar). But if not, passengers will be crushed, whether by an entire carriage turning into "crash zone" or by inertial forces banging them against seats or walls in a rigid carbody: the energies involved are just too big. (Talking of which, I once met a taxi driver who used to be a rail accident investigator during 'communism'. He talked of an accident then held secret, when during a military exercise, Soviet Red Army officers slept in a sleeper wagon, whose brakes weren't pulled -- and rolled down the hill, crashing at the back of a freight train with 160 km/h. The car stayed in one piece. The military wouldn't let them in until they removed the corpses, but he told of the horror of all walls having been splattered with blood.)

_{*Lunatic*, n.
One whose delusions are out of fashion.}