[bryananderson]

My understanding (correct me if I’m wrong) is that the 2018 FRA reforms still set a higher crashworthiness standard for mainline stock than fully-separated metro (due to interactions with freight and road traffic), and that this is the case in Europe too. But yeah it’s a huge improvement from the old “rolling bank vault” era, and definitely maddening that many US agencies are still so incurious about improving things! At least Caltrain bought decent-enough modern trains.