In 2006, Sanchez moved into a modest, two-story home in La Crescenta along with his four greyhounds.
A neighbor there, Oliver Amelsberg, 83, described Sanchez as polite but guarded, someone who liked talking about trains over the backyard fence but didn't reveal much about himself. And, like Barber, he also found Sanchez "different" but likable.
"He was a good man," he said. "He acted and talked like a responsible person."
Amelsberg said Sanchez once told him that he knew some teenagers enamored with trains that he'd occasionally wave to on his route.
"He only said that once, but I thought about it when they mentioned they were sending messages" over cellphones, Amelsberg said.
Investigators are looking into reports that Sanchez may have been text messaging a group of teenage rail enthusiasts just before the accident, and the NTSB said Tuesday that it had subpoenaed cellphone records to examine the engineer's text messages.
As Sanchez settled into his La Crescenta house, his visits to Barber began drying up.
"He called me before Christmas and said, 'I am on my way down, let's go to lunch,' but I told him I didn't have time to get ready and he got kind of short with me and hung up," she recalled. "It didn't seem very important at the time, but now it does because it would have been the last time I saw him."
Barber reflected a moment.
"He was so alive and always so up," she said. "I never met anyone so up. That's why it's so difficult to imagine that Rob is dead."
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david.kelly@latimes.com
sam.quinones@latimes.com
Times staff writers Scott Glover and Robert J. Lopez contributed to this report.
