Zing!

Zing.. zing!!

video via youtube . tran travels from right to left at the top of ur screen.
video not mine , credit goes to the person who shot the video.

when a train was coming???

the reflective red and silver thing with the red light on top resting on the top of the car is the crossing arm. You can also see it was down and in proper position if you go full screen in the video posted by allan01. I assume the engineer was sounding the appropriate horn signal approaching the crossing. If not, he's in trouble. It will be on the data recorder if he did.

Those arms are not visible in the video and it doesn't look like she hit them before she and the train collided. Perhaps they were malfunctioning, or she somehow drove under the crossing arms.

You have to look closely, but they are down. The driver of the car has to look directly into the sun as she makes her right turn from the main road into the road that crosses the tracks. To see the train coming up behind her, she would have had to look back over her right shoulder. When she makes the turn, she goes past the lowered crossing arm to cross the tracks. This happens at 12 seconds into the video. By this time, the lead unit (locomotive) has gone by. She strikes the train between the first and second units. She really gets bounced around too. She was pretty lucky to walk away from that.

Look at grade crossings sometime. When the gates are lowered, the gates are staggered so that you cannot be trapped on a crossing. That is, they prevent oncoming traffic from entering the grade crossing. If you are already on the tracks when the bells start sounding and the gates start to lower, just pull forward and off the tracks. Unless, of course, you pulled onto the tracks with no way to exit the danger zone, assuming that the traffic in front of you would clear out in time. But you learned in driver's ed not to do that.

Just like Russian drivers, the railroads have been installing dashboard video cams to make sure that there is a visual record of events.

ETA: I hate to point this out, but crossing arms are made of fiberglass. They break away quite easily if you drive into them. Railroads are constantly replacing them.

Michigan weather and the thing looked like a squashed sardine can. I don't know the fate of the driver or passenger(s).

"car hits train" with "train hits car".

Given the build of those train cars, I would expect the smart car (or any car) to have about the same amount of damage as pictured for colliding with a slow moving train.

Huge difference.

Might as well say, car hits wall (at some unspecified speed), driver survives.

Not the same as train hits car. Any car!

That suggests it was spun around. Probably drove into the side of the train while the train was moving.

WHEE!