Quinn v. New York, N.H. & H.R. Co.

• Decision Date: 04 January 1900
• Citation: 175 Mass. 150,55 N.E. 891
• Parties: QUINN v. NEW YORK, N.H. & H. R. CO.
• Court: United States State Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts Supreme Court

175 Mass. 150

55 N.E. 891

QUINN v. NEW YORK, N.H. & H. R. CO.

Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts, Suffolk.

January 4, 1900

COUNSEL

Jas.

E. Colter, for plaintiff.

Benton & Choate, for defendant.

OPINION

HOLMES, C.J.

This is an action for personal injuries. The plaintiff was a brakeman in the employ of the defendant. He was sitting on the top of a fruit car, with his legs hanging over the side, when his head struck the cornice of a roof over a station platform at Mansfield, and he was knocked off and hurt. He knew that the car upon which he sat was larger than usual; that there was this roof at this place, not very far from the cars; and that there was danger from it. He also knew that he was approaching the place. By his written application for employment, he undertook, as soon as possible, to make a careful examination of all things near the tracks, so that he might understand the dangers attending them. The evidence is a little confused as to the precise distance of the cornice from the line of the nearest rail, but probably it was 1 foot and 5 inches at the nearest point where the plaintiff may be assumed to have struck, and about 14 1/2 feet above the rail.

Employés perhaps may be held to assume the risks ordinarily to be expected upon railroad trains, irrespective of their having actually gone over the road. It may be enough that the risks would be visible on inspection. Ryan v. Railroad Co., 169 Mass. 267, 271, 47 N.E. 877. But it may be also that, if structures are unusually near the track, the risk from them would not be held to be assumed by the employé unless he actually knew their situation. If such a distinction should prevail, it may be that the decisions, by a gradual but inevitable process, ultimately will fix the distance at which structures cease to be ordinary, and become extraordinary, risks. There would be nothing any more anomalous in such a result than there is in fixing the point of change between night and day, or between minority and majority, or the reasonable time for demand upon a note. Therefore it does not dispose of this case, necessarily, to ask, as the counsel for the defendant asked, how we are to draw the line between an object distant 1 foot and 10 or 11 inches, of which the plaintiff was held to take the risk in Goodes v. Railroad Co., 162 Mass. 287, 38 N.E. 500 and one distant 1 foot and 5 inches, as in the present case.

The ground of decision in Goodes v....