Keeney v. Delaware, L. & W. R. Co.

• Decision Date: 14 June 1915
• Parties: KEENEY v. DELAWARE, L. & W. R. CO. No. 10.
• Court: New Jersey Supreme Court

94 A. 604

87 N.J.L. 505

KEENEY

v. DELAWARE, L. & W. R. CO.

No. 10.

Court of Errors and Appeals of New Jersey.

June 14, 1915.

(Syllabus by the Court.)

Appeal from Supreme Court.

Action by Joseph D. Keeney against the Delaware, Lackawanna & Western Railroad Company. Judgment for the defendant on nonsuit, and plaintiff appeals. Affirmed.

Alexander Simpson, of Jersey City, for appellant. Fred B. Scott, of New York City, for appellee.

WALKER, Ch. This case is here on an appeal from a judgment entered on a nonsuit granted at the circuit. The case was tried before, and a verdict passed for the plaintiff. On rule to show cause the Supreme Court set aside the judgment on the ground that a verdict should have been directed for the defendant. On the trial which resulted in the nonsuit the proof was conceded by appellant's counsel to be practically the same as that which was reviewed in the Supreme Court, and he admitted that there was nothing for the trial judge to do but grant a nonsuit, and leave the plaintiff to take his appeal to this court.

The plaintiff was a passenger on a train the last stop of which was at the passenger station in South Orange. He was traveling on a commutation ticket from New York to that place, and remained on the train after it left the station, and when about to alight from it some three-quarters of a mile west of the station, and after it had made the regular station stop, was thrown off the car on which he was riding by reason of a lurch of the train going through a switch. The plaintiff resided nearer the place where he was precipitated from the car than the South Orange station, and claimed that that place was customarily used by him and others as a station. It is true that he and others frequently got off there, but the railroad company did not maintain any station or platform at the place where he was injured, which was in a yard of the defendant where cars were drawn by engines to be stored.

The appellant cited Falk v. Susquehanna R. R. Co., 56 N. J. Law, 380, 29 Atl. 157, as an authority to the effect that the jury could have found that the place in the railroad yard where the plaintiff received his injury was a station. That case was on a demurrer to a declaration, and Lippincott, J., observed at page 384 of 56 N. J. Law, at page 157 of 29 Atl., that the averments of the declaration, while quite broad, contained sufficient certainty of designation of the place as a station at which a passenger had the right to...