Citizens' Passenger Railway Co. v. Public Service Commission

Citations

• 75 Pa. Super. 238
• 1920 Pa. Super. LEXIS 259

Syllabus

<p>Public service commission — Procedure—Appeals—Final order. An order of the Public Service Commission dismissing a demurrer to its jurisdiction and ordering tbe demurrants to answer and proceed to a bearing, is a judgment, order or decree of the Pub-lie Service Commission from which an appeal will lie to the Superior Court.</p> <p>An order of the Public Service Commission requiring a public service company, which was not engaged in the actual business of transportation, to come before the commission and subject itself to investigation, is a forward order of the commission, fraught with such .consequences, that it should be subject to review by a judicial body at the earliest possible moment, so that unnecessary waste of time, money and effort can be avoided.</p> <p>In a proceeding to determine the fair rate to be charged by a public service company, the Public Service Commission, in the performance of its duty in ascertaining the fair present value of the property affected with the public service, is not necessarily obliged to consider the private contracts between the operating company and its lessors, the property owners. As between the parties who made them, those contracts are as secure from interference as those of other citizens. But the public was not a party to those contracts, and no stipulation therein contained, for the benefit of one or the other of the parties thereto, can deprive the public of its paramount right to reasonably adequate service at a reasonably fair rate.</p> <p>The leases between the operating company and the owners of the lessor companies cannot be directly attacked before an administrative body with the avowed end of having the rentals, therein provided for, reduced to such a sum as the Public Service Commission may determine should have been the proper rentals under the circumstances.</p> <p>The Public Service Commission has power to compel the rendition of adequate service at fair rates over the property owned by the lessor compan