The collision happened on Monday evening near Llanbrynmair in Powys. The passenger who died was a man in his sixties, police said. His next of kin have been informed.
A further 15 people were taken to hospital following the collision shortly before 7pm, according to British Transport Police.
The trains, which were both Class 158s operated by Transport for Wales (TfW), were the 6.31pm service from Shrewsbury to Aberystwyth and the 7.09pm service from Machynlleth to Shrewsbury.
News website WalesOnline reported that a passenger on one of the trains, Jonah Evans, 25, said the driver warned travellers what was about to happen.
He said: “The driver ran in and sat on a chair and said ‘Brace yourselves, we’re about to hit a train.’ Someone lost their teeth, cracked ribs. Because the driver told us it was happening, we could kind of get ready.”
A passenger on the Shrewsbury-bound service, Anthony Hurford, told BBC Breakfast: “The word that keeps coming to my head is just ‘brutal’, really. Just going from, I don’t know how fast we were going, maybe 40, 50, 60 miles an hour, to nothing in the blink of an eye.
“Somehow my body bent the leg of a table and ripped it off its bolts attached to the wall. Suddenly I was on the floor with my laptop strewn ahead of me wondering what the hell had happened. We tried to stop at the lights. At the top of the hill, there’s a signal that I guess would’ve been a passing place and for whatever reason the train wouldn’t stop.
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