I've been following the thread concerning this wreck on trainorders.com and a couple of newspaper websites. They said this car drove around crossing gates that were already down, the train had already made the crossing and hit the train 20 cars back from the locomotives. The train crew never even felt the impact or were in anyway alerted to the fact that something bad had happened. Also, the dragging equipment detector that Mark mentioned that finally alerted the train crew was 4 miles down the track from the crossing where the car hit the train. Hopefully this person never knew what hit them!

Cheers!
Bill