Chicago, Milwaukee & St. Paul Railway Co. v. City of Minneapolis

Citations

• 232 U.S. 430
• 34 S. Ct. 400
• 58 L. Ed. 671
• 1914 U.S. LEXIS 1373

Syllabus

<p>Railroad corporations may be required, at their own expense, not only to abolish grade crossings, but also to build and maintain suitable bridges or viaducts to carry highways, newly laid out, over their tracks or to carry their tracks over such highways.</p> <p>This rule has been declared as the established law of the State, of Minnesota by its highest courts.</p> <p>The same rule applies to a highway laid out to increase the advantages' of a public park. Such a highway is a crossing devoted to the public use. Shoemaker v. United States, 147 U. S. 282.</p> <p>The same rule also applies where the crossing is a canal or water-way connecting other waters and although within a public park; the fact, and not the mode, of public passage, controlé.</p> <p>The condemning of a strip of the right-of-way of a railroad company and compelling that company to build at its own expense a bridge • over the part so taken so as to permit a municipality in Minnesota to construct a canal connecting two lakes all within the limits of a park devoted to public recreation is not an unconstitutional taking of private property without due process of law within the meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment.</p>