Louis Brandeis

“ We need not undertake a definition of the term 'common carrier' for all purposes. Nor are we concerned with questions of corporate power or of duties to shippers, which frequently compel nice distinctions between public and private carriers. We have merely to determine whether Congress, in declaring the Hours of Service Act applicable 'to any common carrier or carriers, their officers, agents, and employes, engaged in the transportation of passengers or property by railroad,' made its prohibitions applicable to the Terminal and its employes engaged in the operations here involved. ”

“ One who transports property from place to place over a definite route as agent for a common carrier may, under conceivable circumstances, be a private carrier. But what is there in the facts above recited to endow the Terminal with that character? The service which it performs is distinctly public in character; that is, conveying between Brooklyn and points on any of the ten interstate carriers and their connections all property that is offered. The fact that the railroad of the Terminal is short does not prevent it from being a common carrier ”

“ In no respects, therefore, does the service actually performed by the Terminal for or in respect to shippers differ from that performed by the railroad companies at their other stations. True, the service is performed by the Terminal under contracts with the railroad companies as agent for them and not on its own account. But a common carrier does not cease to be such merely because the services which it renders to the public are performed as agent for another. The relation of connecting carriers with the initial carrier is frequently that of agent. ”