Can I say they are interchangeable in terms of meaning though the usage could be different? Is the て-form used more in daily conversation while the ます-stem is used more in reporting like articles in newspapers?
Exactly.
寂しくても一台だけのジープに乗せられ、黒々とした林の中を通り過ぎていくのである。
Here I am in a lone jeep with the black mass of the foliage rushing by.
sabishikute mo ichidai dake no jiipu ni noserare,kokukoku to shita hayashi no naka o toorisugite iku no de aru.
This is not a literal translation at all.
The transliteration of 黒々 to 'kokukoku' is simply a mistake. Probably the dictionary being used for machine transliteration did not include the word 黒々 and the fallback strategy was to use the most-common ON reading for unknown kanji compounds.
This ～ても doesn't translate well to 'even if', but it is still a contrasting conjunction.
The translation looks like it was made with knowledge of the larger context, and most likely for ordinary readers and not for educational purposes.
Assuming that translation is in spirit correct, using it as a guide we can see that 乗せられ means that the speaker was given a ride by the jeep, a regular passive, not a suffering passive. The translation has reversed the verb, not 'being given a ride in' but 'am in' (= 'am riding in').
If I were to be very literal, I would say "Although it is lonely, I am being given a ride in the solitary jeep, passing through the middle of the pitch black woods."
This is not the sort of sentence you'd want to put into a professional translation of a story, of course, but it preserves as much of the original grammar through translation as I can reasonably manage.
A lot of example sentences out there have been taken out of their original context in a larger work. You'll find that they often have very mismatched grammar because the most literal translation does not sound good in the target language, and also you'll find that the English often includes things that are simply not in the Japanese at all, but rather are inferred from a context where the translator had that information from earlier sentences.
In this case the only 'extra' information is that the subject is the speaker and that the jeep is moving quickly ('rushing'), but you'll most likely come across examples where tremendous amounts of information are in the English that aren't in the Japanese because they are being inferred from a previous sentence. The context-sensitive nature of Japanese isn't the only cause, either -- in either translation direction, entire descriptive clauses can move from one sentence to a nearby sentence for purposes of making a smooth, natural translation.
For these reasons, it's important to be cautious of reading too much into out-of-context translations that were taken from outside material. Sentence constructed specifically for educational purposes are likely to be better behaved, but even then, there are often omitted subjects in the Japanese that are included in the English translation.
