Fact of the matter is, people don't like to be responsible. That includes, for example, local papers making local people seem responsible when an "outsider" such as a train is available to blame.
Take our current financial crisis. Yes, I know the banks shouldn't have been making loans to people who can't afford them, and then trading the severely dangerous risk around like it was some great new cosmetic creme and everyone wanted to be covered in it. Papers love laying it on thick to those big nasty investment banks who clearly forced people who couldn't afford loans to take them out.
Yeah, right. The American public doesn't like to acknowledge that, at the heart of it, this problem was primarily the fault of the American people trying to live so far beyond their means, they couldn't even see their means, let alone know what they were. They don't want to admit that John and Jane Q. Public are as much if not more to blame for their own irresponsible behavior. We found someone to blame, and it is a big faceless mass of "investment banks."
When one our own gets killed at a rail crossing, it is so much more comforting to blame it on the big faceless mass of a P42 locomotive and its big faceless corporate owner, Amtrak.