NTSB has yet to interview injured engineer

Associated Press

HOBOKEN, N.J.

National Transportation Safety Board investigators held off questioning the engineer in the deadly Hoboken train crash because of his injuries Friday 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 Thursday morning. A woman on the platform was killed, and more than 100 others were injured.

NTSB vice chairwoman T. Bella Dinh-Zarr said the board, the lead agency in the investigation, has been “in touch” with Gallagher, but “unfortunately, as you may know, he was injured, so we’re scheduling the interview with 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, the NTSB retrieved the event recorder that was in the locomotive at the rear of the train but hasn’t been able to download its data and has 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 be safely entered yet because it is under a collapsed section of the station’s roof.