Tuesday’s Amtrak derailment(脱轨）Philadelphia，which claimed eight lives and injured more than 200 others has turned the country’s attention to railroad safety. But for those commuters (每日往返上班者）questioning whether or not to board the next train, statistics may offer some reassurance(信心).

According to the scientific journal Bandolier the lifetime odds of dying on a passenger train in the US are about one in 1,871,241. So trains are still one of the safest modes of transport; in 2013, 891 U.S. fatalities were linked to rail travel, while 32,700 people were killed in highway accidents.

“Train accidents are rare," Dr. Zarembski, director of the railroad safety program, told The Huffmgton Post “Accident rate in 2014 was 2.2 accidents per million train miles, this number has been declining steadily.” But if you are still concerned about safety -----or if you’re just curious about which part of the train is the safest place to sit ----science has an answer for that too.

The front car of a train is the most dangerous place in the event of a head-on collision, while the last car is less safe if the train is rear-ended(追尾). In fact，trains are nine times more likely to derail train to hit another train or car head-on or to get hit from behind, according to the Federal Railroad Administration. The administration found that there were about 13,200 derailments from 2005 to 2014，compared with about 1,450 collisions.

Studies suggest that broken rails or welds are the leading cause of derailment, and these problems more often cause derailments near the front of the train. Therefore, choosing a car located in the middle, or one or two back from the middle of the train may be the safest bet, Ross Capon, president of the National Association of Railroad Passengers, told CBS New York.

If you can’t get a seat near the midpoint of a train, there's another potential safety factor you might want to consider — namely, which way your seat is facing. “I prefer rear facing so that in most cases you are pushed back into the seat in the event of an emergency braking application.” Zarembski said.

In general, aisle(过道）seats are safer than window seats, where a passenger is more likely to come in contact with broken glass or be thrown out of the train. Capon told CBS New York. Of course, in the very rare event of a catastrophic crash like Tuesday’s，there’s no guarantee that sitting in a certain place or facing a certain way means you’ll escape being injured.