Yeah, well that's a "damned if you do, damned if you don't" situation, since going through a disjointed rail section at speed isn't apt to be safe either.
Still, the earlier question about whether the rear of the train was pushing the front, with the passengers in the middle, seems like a good one. Passenger cars today are constructed to be unbelievably rigid. While this is in many ways better than the old days when they would "telescope", crushing anyone inside, it still does not allow any place to dissipate the kinetic energy of a train going 60mph.
One thing I was wondering about is whether it would be useful to construct trains with one or two "crusher" cars which would not be populated but would be designed to collapse to a fraction of their original length without derailing, and possibly to come apart in case the train in front derailed (so as to avoid if at all possible derailing the cars in back).
Although in the Bourbonais crash a few years ago the locomotive was in front, I feel somewhat paranoid about trains where the locomotive is in the rear. If the front of such a train hits anything, the locomotive is going to put a lot of kinetic energy into the rest of the train.