Corcoran v. Boston & Albany Railroad Co.

• Decision Date: 15 November 1882
• Citation: 133 Mass. 507
• Court: United States State Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts Supreme Court
• Parties: Eliza Corcoran, administratrix, v. Boston & Albany Railroad Company

133 Mass. 507

Eliza Corcoran, administratrix, v. Boston & Albany Railroad Company

Supreme Court of Massachusetts

November 15, 1882

Hampden. Tort, by the administratrix of George Corcoran, for personal injuries sustained by her intestate in his lifetime while a brakeman upon a freight train of the defendant corporation. The declaration alleged that the injury was caused by the intestate being knocked from a ladder on the side of a car, (upon which it was his duty to go while the train was passing through a rocky cut,) by an accumulation of ice and snow, which the defendant had negligently suffered to be there.

At the trial in the Superior Court, before Putnam, J., there was evidence tending to show the following facts:

At a point on the defendant's road was a cut, the sides of which were of rock, and, on the side where it was contended the intestate was injured, the rail was five or six feet from the face of the rock. In the winter season, ice formed on the sides of the cut, caused by the dripping of water through and down the face of the rock, several inches sometimes forming in a single night. On the night when the accident happened ice projected about two feet from the face of the rock, and near the centre of the cut, the space between the rail and the face of the ice was from twenty-eight inches, at a point one foot above the track, to thirty-five inches at a point four feet above the track. A freight car projects twenty-four inches beyond the rail, and a man on the ladder on the side of the car would project from one to two feet from the side of the car. The accident happened on the night of February 5, 1881, which was a very cold night.

While the train was going through the cut, at the rate of fifteen miles an hour, the intestate was seen to go down from the top of a house car to a platform car to set the brake on that car, and this was the last seen of him alive. The brake on the platform car was afterwards found to be set. His next duty was to ascend a ladder on the side of a house car, in the rear of the platform car, to set the brake on that car. His lighted lantern was seen on the top of this car, and the lantern was afterwards found there.

The train of cars was moving towards the east, and the greater part of the intestate's dead body was found a quarter of a mile to the eastward of the centre of the cut. An impression was found in the snow by the side of the track just east of the...