Agency waits to talk with train’s engineer
Investigators struggle to get clues about the deadly New Jersey train crash from the train’s recorders.
HOBOKEN, N.J. — National Transportation Safety Board investigators Friday held off questioning the engineer in Thursday’s deadly Hoboken train crash because of his injuries and struggled to lift clues from the train’s black box recorders.
Authorities want to know why the NJ Transit commuter train with engineer Thomas Gallagher at the controls smashed through a steel-and-concrete bumper and hurtled into the station’s waiting area. A woman on the platform was killed, and more than 100 others were injured.
NTSB vice chair T. Bella Dinh-Zarr said the board, the lead agency in the investigation, has been “in touch” with the injured Gallagher but has yet to interview him. She said blood and urine were taken from him and sent for testing, standard procedure in train accidents.
However, a government official said investigators from one of the other agencies taking part in the probe interviewed Gallagher three times Friday. The official, who was not authorized to discuss the case and spoke on condition of anonymity, would not disclose what Gallagher said but described him as cooperative.
Meanwhile, investigators retrieved the event recorder that was in the locomotive at the rear of the train but have not yet been able to download its data and have gone to the manufacturer for help, DinhZarr said. The event recorder contains speed and braking information.
The NTSB also hasn’t been able to extract a recorder from the forward-facing video camera in the train’s mangled first car, Dinh-Zarr said. She said the wreckage cannot yet be safely entered because it is under a collapsed section of the station’s roof.
Investigators were also reviewing security video from the train station, inspecting the nearby tracks, and gathering records on the crew members’ training, scheduling and health, Dinh-Zarr said.
The engineer, conductor and brakeman “have been very cooperative,” she said.
Gallagher, 48, a NJ Transit engineer for about 18 years, was pulled from the wreckage, treated at a hospital and released.
“The one thing we know for sure is that the train came into the station too fast. Why that is, we don’t know,” New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie said. “Was it error by the engineer? Did he have some type of medical emergency or circumstance that rendered him unable to control the train? Was there some equipment failure that didn’t allow him to slow down?”
Authorities would not estimate how fast the train was going before it hit the bumper at the end of its track. But the speed limit for trains entering the station is 10 mph.