What we know about NJ Transit engineer Thomas Gallagher

MORRIS PLAINS, New Jersey (WABC) -- A lot of the answers to the lingering questions about the New Jersey Transit train crash in Hoboken on Thursday will come from the train's engineer.

48-year-old Thomas Gallagher lives in Morris Plains.

His neighbors here speak very highly of him. The engineer in the deadly crash has lived there for a very long time with his family with this wife, teenage daughters and his mother-in-law.

Thursday evening, his wife arrived home with a police escort. She stopped home briefly, picked up her two daughters, and left again.

A neighbor who was with the family, said they're having a hard time with this, obviously, with the circumstances.

He says Gallagher has been an engineer for a long time. In fact, he said it was his childhood dream to be an engineer.

"Just a fine, fine family. Great next door neighbors, wonderful kids, very caring people about others. It's just tragic, in terms of what they're going through, or what they're going to be going through. But just very nice, and when I heard it, or actually saw you come up, and heard that was the case, I could not believe it," said Tom Jones, the engineer's neighbor.

The cause of the accident is still not known.

Gallagher was injured in the crash but was released from the hospital Thursday evening. He has been cooperating with investigators.