Lampkin v. McCormick

Citations

• 105 La. 418

Syllabus

<p>Syllabus.</p> <p>1. Railroad corporations backing their trains through danger points in the streets of a city must use proper care and take proper precautions to safeguard citizens upon them. If they entirely fail to do this, they assume the risk of injury to individuals even if the injury received be due to some extent to the latter’s imprudence and forgetfulness. They can not fail en tirely in their duty and argue that had the duty been performed it would have been in the particular case unavailing. The results should have been put to the test by actual trial made at the time.</p> <p>2. A street of a city does not cease to be such because left unimproved and' almost its entire width, with the consent of the Council, is occupied by the tracks of railroad corporations. The open spaces between the railroad tracks are public places and persons occupying them are neither trespassers nor licensees.</p> <p>3. Where trainmen in control of a railroad train, back it down opposite a dan ger point in the street of a city, without precautions of any kind to signify its approach or to warn or protect citizens, at the precise moment that a passenger train is moving in the other direction on a parallel track, and in so doing strikes and kills a person occupying the open space between the two lines of track, the company is responsible for the injury, although the person injured may have contributed to some extent, by imprudently backiug in a moment of forgetfulness into the open space taken up by the overlapping of cars, outside the rails.</p>