Ask HN: A non-functional black box on Hoboken train?

This seems either wildly irresponsible, or wildly abnormal to me. Are trains really operating with non-functional event data recorders? "The engineer woke up on the floor and doesn't remember the accident." Apparently no one can say for certain even how fast the train was going... Can anyone explain what's going on here? It seems bizarre to me that we would not have a confirmed known speed or event data recording... is it really operating that much into amateur hour?