Investigators yet to question engineer in N.J. train crash
hoboken, n.j. » National Transportation Safety Board investigators Friday held off questioning the engineer in the deadly Hoboken train crash because of his injuries and struggled to lift clues from the train’s blackbox 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 Thursday morning. A woman on the platform was killed, and more than 100 others were injured.
NTSB vice chair T. Bella DinhZarr 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 that 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 haven’t yet been able to download its data and have gone to the manufacturer for help, Dinh-Zarr 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.
Gallagher, 48, a NJ Transit engineer for about 18 years, was pulled from the wreckage, treated at a hospital and released, Dinh-Zarr said.