Toddler Killed by Amtrak Train in Encinitas : Accident: Boy struck after wandering unnoticed from home. His is the seventh train-related death since October on North County tracks.

An 18-month-old toddler playing on a railroad track in Encinitas was hit and killed Saturday morning by a southbound Amtrak train that had been traveling at 88 m.p.h.

The approaching engineer spotted Geraldo Santiago Andreas, who had wondered off from his home nearby, and applied the emergency brakes, but the train still struck the child at about 60 m.p.h. and dragged the body before coming to a stop, authorities said.

“He was killed instantly,” said George Dickason, a county medical examiner investigator. It was the seventh train-related death in San Diego County since early last October.

Sheriff’s Sgt. Roy Stamper said the unidentified engineer “tooted his horn and (the child) stood up,” but the passenger train was going too fast to halt on time.

“They’re like a nonstop bomb going down the road--if they see it, they can hit it,” Stamper said. “There have been a lot of fatalities along the Del Mar-Encinitas route.”

He said the boy had wandered away from his home several blocks from the tracks and was dead by the time his mother, Guadalupe Reynoso, noticed him missing.

The child was killed at 9:55 a.m. and “his mom called us about 11 minutes later saying she didn’t know where her son was,” Stamper said.

Authorities quickly matched the woman’s description of the child’s clothing with that of the victim, and sheriff’s representatives went to the family’s home on the 300 block of North Vulcan.

The mother “emotionally just caved in,” Stamper said.

According to a Sheriff’s Department statement, Geraldo had been gone a matter of minutes when the Amtrak engineer saw “an object” on the west side of the tracks as the train approached the Leucadia Boulevard crossing.

The engineer sounded the whistle twice and “the object moved and became recognizable as a child,” according to the statement. The emergency braking system slowed the train, but it still skidded about 300 yards before slamming into Geraldo and dragging him an unknown distance.

Stamper said, “When they hit him, he has hit at 60 m.p.h.”

There were initial reports that the child’s older brother was at the scene during the mishap, but Stamper said the information couldn’t be confirmed.

Both the Sheriff’s Department and the Santa Fe Railroad are investigating the incident, and Stamper said it appears unlikely that Reynoso faces prosecution.

“I don’t think there was any felony negligence on her part,” he said.

The child’s death is another episode that highlights the dangerous stretch of tracks owned by Santa Fe that carries frequent freight and passenger trains.

Last Oct. 5, a Carlsbad grocery clerk was killed by an Amtrak train while he carried a bicycle along a trestle near Basilone road north of Oceanside. Eight days later, a passenger train fatally struck a woman as she sat on the tracks in Encinitas smoking a cigarette.

Then, on Oct. 21, an Amtrak train hit and killed two migrant workers as they reportedly sat on the tracks playing cards in Leucadia.

Two more died on Dec. 5, when Usha Waney, 47, of La Jolla, was killed instantly by a 2,000-ton train as she rushed to cross the tracks at the Del Mar Amtrak station. Roberta Halpern, 44, of Encinitas died as she and her husband tried to pull Waney away from the oncoming train.

Demands for greater safety resulted from the spate of accidents, which Sharon Greene, executive director of the Los Angeles-San Diego Rail Corridor Agency, in December called the worst she had seen during her nine years in the job.

Her agency is seeking federal funds to raise or lower train tracks at 92 crossings between Los Angeles and San Diego, about half of them in this county. The safety project would cost about $736 million.