[*BCM*] cyclist killed at train crossing

[Dan Barrett]

/*
Note the key part: Beverly's ban on train whistles cannot be reviewed, 
because the accident did involve a car
*/


Bicyclist, 14, killed near train crossing
Officials say boy rode around gate

By Steven Rosenberg and Mac Daniel, Globe Staff  |  October 14, 2004

BEVERLY -- Darting away from his mother and younger sister yesterday while 
riding his mountain bike to school, 14-year-old David Siljeholm rode 
around the dropped arms and blinking lights of a railroad crossing gate 
and was struck by an inbound MBTA commuter train, dying instantly, 
authorities said.



Siljeholm, whose family recently moved from Melrose to 
Manchester-by-the-Sea, died about 50 yards from the crossing at Hale and 
West streets in Beverly Farms at about 7:45 a.m., with his mother and 
sister arriving at the scene seconds later, unaware of what had happened, 
officials said.



Beverly is one of the communities in Massachusetts that have been granted 
state permission to enact whistle bans and opt out of regulations that 
require trains to sound their whistles for at least three blasts before 
every street-level railroad crossing. That means that no whistle was 
sounded as the commuter train approached Siljeholm, according to 
preliminary reports on the accident by the Federal Railroad Administration 
and the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority.



Joe Santoro, who was working on a road construction project near the 
crossing, said he heard the accident and immediately rushed toward the 
train.



"I heard a loud crack, and I said to my truck driver, 'The train just hit 
something,' " he said. "Then we saw papers floating down, and we ran over 
and saw the bicycle and the kid on the tracks."



Seconds later, he said, he watched the boy's mother and sister cross the 
tracks on their bicycles. "She came up and said, 'What happened?' " 
Santoro said. "I told her some kid just got hit by a train, and she said, 
'Oh my God, that's my son.' "



Steve O'Connell, spokesman for Essex District Attorney Jonathan W. 
Blodgett, said yesterday that the accident remains under investigation.



"He had sprinted ahead of us," said the boy's mother, Anita Siljeholm, who 
was accompanying her son and daughter, Marian, to school when the accident 
occurred.



According to O'Connell and officials of the MBTA and the railroad 
administration, the gates at the crossing were down, and warning lights 
were flashing at the time of the accident. The MBTA and the federal agency 
also said bells were ringing.



The accident occurred less than a mile from the Cape Ann Waldorf School in 
Beverly Farms, a private elementary and middle school where Siljeholm was 
in the eighth grade. School officials said that parents, students, and 
faculty were reeling from the news.



"He was the kind of son every mother would want to have," Anita Siljeholm 
said in a brief interview in front of the school. "He was a wonderful, 
warm, kind, intelligent, loving child. We will always, always remember 
that and honor him; honor his kindness and his humor and his wisdom. He 
was a wise child."



In addition to his mother and sister, the teenager leaves his father, Jorn 
Siljeholm, a researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who 
worked in Iraq as a United Nations weapons inspector prior to the US 
invasion; and a brother, Eivind.



By midmorning, parents had flocked to the Waldorf School, where stunned 
students hugged one another and grief counselors mingled in classrooms and 
hallways. Federal Railroad Administration spokesman Warren Flatau said 
yesterday that the fatal accident at Hale Street probably will have no 
impact the community's ban on train whistles, because it involved a 
bicycle and not a motor vehicle.



If the accident had involved a motor vehicle, Flatau said, the ban could 
have been reviewed.



Peter Johnson -- who with his wife, Joan, established a website, 
www.beverly-blast.org, which opposes federal efforts to eliminate whistle 
bans -- lives about three-quarters of a mile from where the accident 
occurred.



He said he was disturbed by news of Siljeholm's death. "It causes me 
pause," he said. "I'm really distraught for the parents."



He added, however, that he still supports banning whistles and pointed out 
that opponents are not arguing against them on safety grounds. If the 
whistle ban was not in place, Johnson said, there would be 2,040 whistle 
blasts per day in Beverly. One alternative for safety at the crossings, he 
said, would be to install four-way crossing gates at all 17 crossings in 
Beverly, at an estimated cost of $225,000 each.



Beverly has 17 at-grade crossings, the largest number in the state, 
Johnson said. Whistles are banned at all of the intersections. According 
to Federal Railroad Administration records, Beverly has had no accidents 
the agency classified as relevant in the five years before December 2003. 
Since 1975, the earliest year of data in the railroad administration's 
federal accident database, there have been no fatal accidents at the 
crossing where Siljeholm died, Flatau said.