People are allowed to have irrational fears all they want. It's a free country.
The person who is afraid to fly because of the recent crash in San Francisco, or afraid to take European trains because of a couple of recent derailments, or afraid to do x, y, or z because of some recent high-profile tragedy, probably has no qualms about driving down the interstate or walking across the street, both of which are far more likely to get you killed.
Too tired to do extremely detailed research, but back-of-the-envelope calculations indicate Amtrak carries somewhere around 6.5 billion passenger-miles annually (
this link mention's Amtrak's FY10 LD ridership as being 2.8 billion passenger-miles, and 44% of Amtrak's total PMs, so that amounts to 6.36 billion for the whole system, then allow for a little bit of ridership growth, so 6.5 billion is close enough). In
Europe, there were aproximately 223 billion passenger-miles in 2011 (359 billion passenger-kms). To be fair, I'm sure that includes more than just intercity trains, and I don't have total data on commuter trains in the US.
Still, in Europe in 2011, there were a total of 19 deaths caused by train collisions or derailments. There were also six passengers killed in grade-crossing incidents (as separate from collisions or derailments). That brings the total number of fatalities due to derailments/collisions to 0.112 per
billion passenger-miles. I won't include the "other" fatailities in grade-crossing incidents (neither employees nor passengers, i.e. people who drove in front of a train) as that is not the fault of the train, and doesn't reflect the safety of the train itself (and it can be easily avoided by simply paying attention). And besides, we have plenty of those here, too. I also won't include what is categorized as "Accidents to persons caused by rolling stock in motion," which, as far as I can tell, means "people who got hit by a train." Again, avoided easily enough by simply paying attention, and not really a factor of equipment design.
The 79 deaths in Spain due to the derailment the other day really are a statistical anomaly. Granted, the equipment doesn't stand up as well in a derailment, but you also have to factor that in with the likelihood of a derailment happening in the first place. But, let's pretend this derailment occurred in 2011 and added to that year's death total (since, obviously, we don't have total figures for 2013 yet, so making any analysis for this year would be impossible). That would bring 2011's total to 104 passenger and crew fatalities due to derailments and collisions. Divide that by the 223 billion passenger-miles, and you get 0.466 fatalities per billion passenger-miles. For Amtrak to match that fatality rate, they'd need 3 passenger or crew fatalities per year (and yes, there are years where they do match or exceed that rate). For Amtrak to match the actual 2011 rate of 0.112, they couldn't have more than 1.5 fatalities every two years.
To compare that to automobile travel, in the US in 2011 there were
32,367 fatalities in car accidents, which amounts to 1.1 per 100 million vehicle-miles. I don't have total passenger-miles, but average car occupancy is around 1.5-ish, so let's just estimate it at 7 fatalities per billion passenger-miles.
And, now that I've gone and written all that, one last Google search turned up
this page, which summed it all up with a bit more detail (including commuter rail in the US statistics). Those numbers indicate that European railroads, with those unsafe rolling death traps, are 3-4 times safer than US passenger railroads, with our slow, safe speeds and built-like-tanks equipment.
