Railroad law

“ Railroad regulation does not require the adoption of any new principle of law. If the common law is rightly applied and provision is made for its strict and systematic enforcement, it will meet every condition that is likely to arise in the transportation business. ”

“ The common law is sufficient in theory, but it has failed in practice.... In practice, legal remedies against railway injustice can be applied to the courts only by fighting the railways at such disadvantages that the ordinary business man will never undertake it except in desperate cases. Every advantage of strength and position is with the railways.... This [the railroad] power has kept courts in its pay; it defies the principles of common law and nullifies the constitutional provisions of a dozen States; it has many representatives in Congress and unnumbered seats in the State legislatures. ”

“ Our railroad legislation contains no principle that is not found in the common law. Its maxims are our [Pg 160] birthright and will be the birthright of our children and children's children, and while railroad companies may be able in the future, as they have been in the past, to violate the law temporarily with impunity, they will never be able to prevail upon the American people to abandon the policy of railroad reform which the passage of the Interstate Commerce Law inaugurated. ”

“ Without legislative sanction no one has a right to put upon it a team of elephants or a locomotive and train of cars, or other strange motors, and thereby obstruct the public travel. These restrictions might be removed by the legislative power, and there is also no doubt that under the common law the State has the right to permit the independent use of the railroad track by any person having motive power and cars adapted to it. ”

“ Since the adjustment of business under this law, there has been less friction between the people and the railroads than before for thirty years, and so satisfactory has it proved to all that no one, not even a railroad man, has to this day asked the legislature to repeal the law or any part of it. The act contains no new principle of railroad control. By far the greater part of its provisions were taken from the old law. Nearly every one of its features may be found either in the Interstate Commerce Act or upon the statute books of other States. ”

“ There should be additions to the Interstate Law, or a special law regulating the methods of construction companies, which are probably doing more to demoralize the railroad system—and doing it very insidiously, too—than any other factor connected with these great arteries of the country's prosperity. ”

“ If such be the law as to persons who, for their own purposes, cause projections to overhang the highway not constructed by them, a fortiori must it be the law as to those who, for their own purposes of prof it, undertake to construct the highway itself, and to keep it serviceable and safe, yet who allow it to be practically overhung, from considerations of economy or through negligence. We think the case of Railroad Co. ”

“ It is instead a jungle in which the wayfaring railroad man may easily lose his way, and possibly be actually devoured by "laws with teeth in them." We hear a great deal about the simple desire that the railroads shall obey the law; but who is wise enough to say what the law is, when only yesterday the Supreme Court of the United States left an important case unsettled, so far as it was concerned, because it was divided four to four. ”

“ Constitutional provisions and State and Federal statutes have been passed to affirm and 2enforce the rule. The railroads themselves declare the rule to be right. And yet, in spite of the railway conscience and the common law, the universal sense of justice of mankind, and the whole legislative, executive, and judicial power of the government, the rule is not obeyed. ”

“ Railroad corporations, like all other corporations and persons, doing business within the territorial jurisdiction of a state, are subject to its law. It is in the law of the state that provisions are to be found concerning the rights and duties of common carriers of persons or of goods, and the measures by which injuries resulting from their failure to perform their obligations may be prevented or redressed. Persons traveling on interstate trains are as much entitled, while within a state, to the protection of that state, as those who travel on domestic trains. ”

“ The duties of a rail carrier are not necessarily limited to transporting freight and passengers to and from its stations. It must, in connection with its stations, provide adequately for ingress and for egress. And if it does not itself provide the facilities essential for the convenient removal of freight and passengers from the station, it may be required to let others provide them. That a railroad's obligations may be extended beyond its rails, is settled by numerous decisions of this court. ”

“ The balance is built and operated on private right of way, and goes around, rather than through, the cities. The tracks are standard gauge and of standard railroad construction, were, at the time they were laid, of higher class than those of the Southern Railway Company in the same territory, were intended for handling substantial interchange freight traffic in connection with steam railroads, have the same ruling grades as the latter in the same territory, and are of 80-pound rail. ”

“ Railroads are not like stages or steamboats, which, if furnishing no profit at one place, and under one prescribed rate of transportation, can be taken elsewhere and put to use at other places and under other circumstances. The railroad must stay, and, as a permanent investment, its value to its owners may not be destroyed. ”

“ That the meaning contended for would be in direct conflict with this rule would seem free from doubt, since the inevitable result of sustaining the contention would be to put it in the power of a railroad, by operating a train for a trifling distance over tracks within the exception, to thereby secure the right thereafter to operate such train over long distances without regard to compliance with the safeguards of the statute which otherwise would be controlling. ”

“ It is very much to the interest of the future growth of the United States to have the railroad business offer such rewards to the investor that money will flow freely into building up the transportation machine, and to offer such attractions to the best talent of the country, that men will engage in the business as freely as they engage in banking, in law, in medicine, in manufacturing, and in agriculture. ”

“ Perhaps the most remarkable invention of modern times, in the influence which it has had, and is yet to have, on the affairs of the world, as well as in its total change of all the elements on which land transportation formerly depended, is the railroad system. It is not strange, then, that when we are called to construe a statute relating to this class of subjects, passed before a steam engine or a railroad was thought of, in its application to this modern system, we should be met by difficulties of the gravest character. ”

“ True, if they were rejected, the two clauses, in the instance of a train composed of many cars, some moving interstate traffic and others moving intrastate traffic, would, by their concurrent operation, bring the entire train within the statute. But it is not necessary to reject them to accomplish this result, for the first clause, with those words in it, does even more; that is to say, it embraces every train on a railroad which is a highway of interstate commerce, without regard to the class of traffic which the cars are moving. ”

“ It is also held in many of the states (in fact the rule is well-nigh, if not quite, universal) that a railroad company, under certain circumstances, will not be held free from negligence, even though it may have complied literally with the terms of a statute prescribing certain signals to be given, and other precautions to be taken by it, for the safety of the traveling public at crossings. ”

“ A wholly unnecessary, even though a small, obstacle, ought not, in fairness, to be placed in the way of an interstate road, which may thus be unable to meet the competition of its rivals. We by no means intend to impair the strength of the previous decisions of this court on the subject, nor to assume that the interstate transportation, either of passengers or freight, is to be regarded as overshadowing the rights of the residents of the state through which the railroad passes to adequate railroad facilities. ”

“ The statute does not stand in the way of the railroad company running as many trains as it may choose between Chicago and Buffalo, without stopping at intermediate points, or only at very large cities on the route, if, in the contingency named in the statute, the required number of trains stop at each place containing 3,000 inhabitants long enough to receive and let off passengers. It seems from the evidence that the average time required to stop a train and receive and let off passengers is only three minutes. ”

“ But, independently of this consideration, there is another answer to the objection taken to the admissibility of the declaration of the engineer. It was immaterial in any view of the case. The engagement of a railroad company is to carry its passengers safely; and, for any injury arising from a defect in its road, or in the rails or ties, which could have been guarded against by the exercise of proper care, it is liable. Its liability does not depend upon the speed of the train, whether it was one mile or eighteen miles an hour. ”

“ The most prevalent condition was that 'the said railroad shall be and remain a public highway for the use of the Government of the United States, free from toll or other charge upon the transportation of any property or troops of the United States.' This was construed to require the railroad to furnish only free use of the rails and permanent structures. ”

“ If the public has any right at all on these crossings, it goes without question that, while they are making use of their rights and in the act of crossing, their safety should depend, not upon their efforts to scramble out of the way of the trains, but upon the moral and legal obligation of the railroads to keep the trains out of the way of the vehicles. ”

“ The legislature of a state could not itself make such an order, and it cannot delegate the power to a commission to do so, in its discretion, when adequate facilities are otherwise furnished.
The transportation of passengers on interstate state trains as rapidly as can with safety be done is the inexorable demand of the public who use such trains. Competition between great trunk lines is fierce and at times bitter. Each line must do its best enen to obtain its fair share of the transportation between states, both of passengers and freight. ”

“ We do not arrogate superior wisdom or intelligence to ourselves when we suggest to the people of the United States, and especially that portion of the country where railroads have been the subject of what we consider to be excessive legislation, that the rational mode of treating any form of human industry that has for its object the performance of desired and lawful service is to let it alone, and that the railway is no exception to this principle. ”

“ The underlying principle in all cases of this kind which requires a railroad company not only to comply with all statutory requirements in the matter of signals, flagmen, and other warnings of danger at public crossings, but many times to do much more than is required by positive enactment, is that neither the legislature nor railroad commissioners can arbitrarily determine in advance what shall constitute ordinary care or reasonable prudence in a railroad company at a crossing, in every particular case which may afterwards arise ”

“ So long as it may fairly be said that the practice required from the motor carrier falls within the meaning the Commission has given to auxiliary and supplemental, the condition is valid.
Such restrictions hamper railroad companies in the use of their physical facilities-stations, terminals, warehouses-their personnel and their capital in the development of their transportation enterprises to encompass all or as much of motor transportation as the roads may desire. The announced transportation policy of Congress did not permit such development. ”

“ Provided, that nothing in this act shall be construed to require through billing of freight as between steam and electric, suburban or interurban railroads, but such suburban and interurban railroads may be used for the handling of freight in carload lots in steam railroad freight cars between shippers or consignees and the steam railroads, in the same manner and under the same general conditions, except as to motive power, as belt line railroads and terminal railroads are now or may hereafter be used for like purposes. ”

“ In the absence of power to compel coordination between the modes of transportation and in the presence of the probable gains in operative efficiency from unified management, we think the Commission, in view of the limitations on the railroad's motor service, is entitled to conclude that the public will be better served by the rail operation than by use of the available motor carrier facilities. ”

“ Our opinion is based rather upon that marked distinction which the mind naturally makes, and which is so generally made in railroad legislation between the road as a thoroughfare and the transaction of the carrier business thereon, whether by the railroad company itself or by other persons, and the manifest intent of Congress, in the legislation under review, to reserve only the free use of the road, and not the active service of the company in transportation. ”