Carufel v. Chesapeake and Ohio Railway Company

• Decision Date: 08 February 1961
• Docket Number: No. 14174.,14174.
• Parties: Joseph CARUFEL, Plaintiff-Appellee, v. CHESAPEAKE AND OHIO RAILWAY COMPANY, Defendant-Appellant.
• Court: U.S. Court of Appeals — Sixth Circuit

286 F.2d 193 (1961)

Joseph CARUFEL, Plaintiff-Appellee, v. CHESAPEAKE AND OHIO RAILWAY COMPANY, Defendant-Appellant.

No. 14174.

United States Court of Appeals Sixth Circuit.

February 8, 1961.

Matthew Davison, Jr., Flint, Mich. (Gault, Davison & Bowers, Flint, Mich., on the brief), for appellant.

Robert B. Benton, Flint, Mich. (Beagle, Benton, Hicks & Fisher, Flint, Mich., on the brief), for appellee.

Before MARTIN, MILLER and CECIL, Circuit Judges.

CECIL, Circuit Judge.

This is an appeal by the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway Company from a judgment entered on a verdict in favor of Joseph Carufel, the appellee.

We will refer to the parties as plaintiff and defendant, as they were in the trial court.

The plaintiff was a truck driver and on or about the 2nd day of November, 1957, at approximately two o'clock in the morning, he was operating a G. M. C. tractor-trailer, in an easterly direction, on U. S. Highway 224, in Seneca County, about twelve miles east of Findlay, Ohio. At this point, the defendant's railroad crossed the highway at grade. When the plaintiff reached the crossing it was preempted by a train of one hundred sixty-seven cars, which was approximately one and a half miles in length. The train was travelling at a speed of about twelve miles per hour. The plaintiff drove his tractor into the ninth car from the rear of the train and as a result of the collision received serious injuries, for which the jury returned a verdict in the sum of $75,000.

The railway company has double tracks which run generally north and south and cross the highway at the point of the collision at right angles. A grade approximately three to three and a half percent begins about four hundred feet west of the crossing, so that the tracks are about ten feet above the level road grade. There are no obstructions at the crossing and in the daytime or on a clear night, the visibility both ways along the tracks is almost unlimited. The crossing was marked by the standard wooden cross-buck signs required by statute. Sec. 4955.33 Ohio Revised Code. About five hundred fifty feet west of the crossing, there was placed, on the shoulder of the highway, a reflectorized advance warning disc sign. At this point, there was also a large reflectorized "X" on the pavement, extending practically all the way across the eastbound lane of the highway.

In addition to these signs there were either sodium or mercury vapor lights placed about eighteen feet above the tracks at the northeast and southwest corners of the intersection. Those lights were designed to illuminate not only the crossing itself but a train that might be on the crossing as well.

The plaintiff had travelled this highway a number of times and was familiar with the railroad crossing at the point of the collision. Although at the time of the accident he did not know exactly how close he was to the crossing, he knew he was in the vicinity of it. The night being foggy, he had planned to stop at a truck stop which he knew he was approaching and which he also knew to be east of the intersection in question.

There was a heavy fog overhanging parts of the highway and in travelling from Findlay to the place of the accident, the plaintiff had passed through several patches of fog which were about a mile in length. At the time of the accident, he had been driving in a dense fog for three or four miles. The plaintiff's tractor-trailer and load weighed approximately twenty-five tons. The evidence is that he had been travelling at a speed of about thirty miles per hour, until he reached the point of the grade, about four hundred feet from the crossing and that he then reduced his speed to twenty-seven or twenty-eight miles per hour; that he had vision for fifty or sixty feet ahead and that he could stop within the distance of his vision.

It is conceded that at the time of the accident the defendant railway company was complying with all statutory requirements.

Counsel for the plaintiff claimed that the crossing in question was an extraordinarily hazardous one and that the railroad company was negligent in not providing safety devices in addition to the statutory requirements. Section 4907.47 Ohio Revised Code provides that a railroad company is not required to use extra safeguards, except by order of the Public Utilities Commission. No order was ever made by the Commission.

There is evidence that it was characteristic of the area of this crossing to be subjected to heavy fogs, during the spring and fall, that the area is swampy and that it is not uncommon for dense fogs to overhang the tracks for a distance of fifteen miles up and down the tracks and a mile in width on each side of the tracks.

The extraordinary hazard, of which the plaintiff complains, is that the vapor lights, installed by the railway company as an extra safety precaution, fused with the fog and motorists' headlights and created a veil of some sort. It is apparently the theory of plaintiff's counsel that the plaintiff could not see through this veil but that he did not know that he could not see. In short, it is claimed that the defendant committed an act of negligence in installing the vapor lights.

In considering whether the crossing in question was an extra hazardous one, we are concerned with the facts in this case. Did the vapor lights create a condition which obscured the plaintiff's vision and proximately cause his accident?

The rule governing the question of extra statutory warnings was stated in Hood v. New York, Chicago & St. Louis Rd. Co., 166 Ohio St. 529, 535, 144 N.E.2d 104, 109: "* * * a railroad is under no duty to provide extrastatutory warnings at a grade crossing, where not required to do so by any order of the Public Utilities Commission, if there is no substantial risk that a driver in the exercise of ordinary care may be unable to avoid colliding with a train that is being operated over the crossing in compliance with statutory requirements." As further indicated by the court (166 Ohio St. at page 536, 144 N.E.2d 104) not every claim for extrastatutory requirements can be submitted to a jury. If, in the first instance, the trial judge determines from the evidence that reasonable minds could not conclude that there was such a substantial risk, as stated in the rule, then the question should not be submitted to the jury.

We do not find any evidence to support plaintiff's claim that the vapor lights created any extraordinary hazard requiring extrastatutory safeguards, or that they caused his accident.

Dr. Richard Blackwell, an expert in problems of visibility, testified on behalf of the plaintiff. He gave a very interesting discourse on the subject of visibility in fog, but we do not find that he says but for the vapor lights the plaintiff could have seen the train. He testified that with a number of given factors one could compute visibility. He said: "This is a difficult computational job, and it takes pages of mathematics. Yet it can be done." Without having any of the necessary factors as they were on the night of the accident, he could not compute the...