(The following article by Mac Daniel was posted on the Boston Globe website on October 20.)
BOSTON — A week after a boy was struck and killed by a train in Beverly, state safety officials decided yesterday against requiring communities statewide to allow train whistles at all crossings, opting instead to ask towns to voluntarily end the bans ”in the interest of public safety.”
But leaders in several communities immediately made clear they have no plans to go along with the request.
State Transportation Secretary Daniel A. Grabauskas, who met yesterday with state safety regulators, said he generally wants trains to be able to use their whistles for safety reasons. But he said he supported the regulators’ decision not to order a change, in part because by January, the issue will be out of state officials’ hands when federal officials take over whistle bans nationwide.
”We’re in this weird two-month window,” he said last night.
The issue pits safety advocates against residents who don’t want their residential peace broken by piercing whistles and loud horns. State officials have found documentation for only 27 of the 107 railroad crossings in the MBTA service area with the prohibitions.
While Mayor David Ragucci of Everett agreed yesterday to lift a longstanding train whistle ban on Second Street, the state’s request met with skepticism around the region, especially in Beverly, where Mayor William Scanlon Jr. said ”it’s very unlikely” he would lift local bans.
”We think that the whistle bans make sense, with whistle blowing only on an emergency basis,” he said. ”We think that having whistles blow every minute of the day simply won’t help anything.”
Scanlon said his office has been swamped with calls on the issue, with the overwhelming majority in favor of maintaining the bans in Beverly, which has 17 railroad crossings — more than any other community in the state.
”Of course, in the case of this accident, as tragic as it is, we see nothing to suggest that a whistle would have changed anything,” Scanlon said.
Asked about the state request to lift the bans, Scanlon said, ”I suspect that some people aren’t really understanding the details.”
Last week, 14-year-old David Siljeholm of Manchester-by-the-Sea was killed at a Beverly commuter rail crossing at which horns were not allowed. Investigators said the crossing gates were down, bells were ringing, and lights were flashing at the time he was struck. Department of Telecommunications and Energy lifted the ban at the West Street crossing after the teen’s death.
Stephen P. Maio, chairman of the Wakefield Board of Selectman, said there would be no need to lift the ban in his town because Wakefield’s transportation safety was evaluated in the spring.
”We believe we have all our ducks in a row,” Maio said. ”We are meeting all of the requirements, and we’ve had pretty good success with the safety measures that are in place.”
Ragucci, however, said the death in Beverly ”was something that really spurred us to work on lifting the ban.”
”When the accident happened, we pushed twice as hard,” he said, adding that only a few residents in Everett live around the Second Street crossing where he ordered the whistle ban lifted.
Still, he said, ”we’ll find out tonight what kind of an impact this is going to have.”
The request was made after Grabauskas met with DTE safety regulators to decide whether 80 undocumented whistle bans in the state should be temporarily lifted.
”We’re certainly urging communities to reconsider at this time,” said Christopher Goetcheus, spokesman for the Office of Consumer Affairs, which oversees the DTE.
He said the state plans to send its findings about local whistle bans to the Federal Railroad Administration, which will use the state data to determine if the whistle bans remain in place.
Federal control of all whistle ban laws, first scheduled for Dec. 18, was recently extended to January.